Finclusive Finclusive Ventures

Garry Cooper is the CEO of Rheaply, a Series-A Climate Tech company in Chicago, and one of six GPs at Longjump VC, a first-check, founder-led fund investing in the next generation of Chicagoland founders. Garry shares his fundraising journey for Rheaply and for Longjump, and ideation process behind the two ventures. LongJump VC had been an idea for Garry and his network of Chicago founders, until George Floyd's death last summer solidified the formation of the fund. The GPs successfully raised over $4 million by the time the fund was announced in March 2021. 

As a Black founder, Garry constantly asks himself, "What more can I do for Black, brown and underserved communities?" He draws parallels between Rheaply's mission of advancing the Circular Economy and LongJump's mission of giving voice to underfunded and unconnected founders. Garry shares his goals for the next ten years, and how he strives to broaden the economy to let more people in. 

Fion is the co-founder and COO of Fairly AI, an AI Governance, Risk, and Control (GRC) solution that keeps organizations' AI responsible and regulated. She discusses her career as a technical and business leader at ATG before, during, and after its Oracle acquisition, her experience with late-stage investing, followed by her interest in early-stage venture investing. She joined Founder Institute, where she met her co-founder and together they launched Fairly AI in April 2020. Fion shares how Fairly AI closes the gap between technical data scientists and non-technical decision makers, and reduces high-velocity financial and ethical AI risk. 

A C-suite executive connector and facilitator, Nicole Ward is the National Director of Sales at Moss Adams LLP, and Podcast host of Watermark Women of the C-Suite. In her conversation with Kelly, she shares her journey in angel investing, her appetite for risk, and the joy she finds in supporting those building something they are passionate about. She shares her journey of making one of her first investments in Porfolia, where women can learn about venture investing from other women. Nicole appreciates the American philanthropic culture and enjoys sharing her time and network with entrepreneurs and new investors. She's also very interested in biohacking and cites her endless energy as one of her sources of power. 

Leigh-Ann Buchanan is the President of aīre ventures, a venture studio scaling technology, entrepreneurial and innovative solutions to systemic gaps in access, opportunity and racial equity. Leigh discusses the Miami Venture Capital ecosystem, her REDI (Racial Equity Diversity and Inclusion) framework for closing opportunity gaps in investing, and why people, purpose and impact are core to everything she does.

Judith Levey is the co-founder and COO of The Desire Company, a content and media platform that helps customers learn new skills from professionals and introduces them to the best products available. Judith shares how her previous corporate PR career at The Coca-Cola Company taught her the skills she needed to found and lead DesireCo, including the lessons she learned from a PR stunt gone horribly wrong. She identifies the “trust gap” between retailers and consumers on ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, and shares how DesireCo aims to close that gap. She reflects on how the company took a hard pivot during the pandemic to scale their online video streaming platform, and how it taught her to embrace speed over perfection when making decisions to save and scale the business. 

Excited to have interviewed Aihui Ong, exited founder turned VC and hired, to learn about her lessons as a female solo founder who Immigrated to the US post-college. She shared her experiences on how was overlooked as a founder because of her gender and background and how she was able to use those experiences to support the founders that she invests in now. She also shared the difference of being a CEO vs a founder and how having a CEO coach really helped her to scale her companies. 

As an entrepreneur and executive, Aihui has built innovative products and a company that ranked as one of the TOP 50 fastest-growing female-led companies in America by Inc. She is an active speaker at tech conferences globally and has been interviewed by Inc, CNBC, Today Show, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and others.

As founder & CEO of EdgiLife (acquired), she’s built a pioneering platform that helped CPG companies rapidly perform A/B test their products, concepts, messaging by leveraging a large nationwide health and wellness community called LoveWithFood.com (acquired), one of the nation’s fastest-growing snack subscription business.

She built the company from the ground up, from writing the initial software on Ruby on Rails to growing sales from zero to multi-million dollar in revenues to raising millions in venture capital and acquiring 4 other subscription companies since its founding in 2012. Her company was also accepted by 500 Startups accelerator program which has a ~2% acceptance rate. EdgiLife and LoveWithFood were acquired by SnackNation in June 2018.