She Has A $60M Fund Investing In Overlooked Markets | Founding Partner of C******a Ventures Samara Hernandez

Today we are honoring the Midwest by shining a light on Samara Hernandez, the Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures. Samara and her team are the perfect examples of the incredible talent living in our hometown of Chicago.

Chingona Ventures is an institutionally backed pre-seed stage fund focusing on investing in tech and tech-enabled companies across the U.S. The fund has $60MM in AUM and has made more than 40 investments across technology sectors in Financial, Food, Future of Work and Learning, and Health/Wellness. 

Samara is on the advisory boards for Coolwater, an organization to support the emerging manager community; Angeles Investors, an organization investing in early-stage startups led by Latinx founders; and Venture Forward, a non-profit working to get more diversity in the venture

capital ecosystem.

She started her career at Goldman Sachs where she continually ranked in the top five for selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting business practices. From there, she became an investor at Math Venture Partners across two funds where she led investment review, diligence, and execution.

While the Midwest can be overlooked by investors, we have a lot of hustle over here and with Samara’s help, business owners with marginalized backgrounds are starting to get the funding they need to do great things. This is especially important as founders with minority backgrounds find it hard to get funding.

In this week’s episode, Samara shares how her path to investing was a reaction to her environment. As a result, Chingona Ventures focuses on industries that are massively changing and founders whose backgrounds uniquely position them to create businesses in growth markets that are often overlooked. She and her team focus on areas in financial technology, the future of work, the future of learning, food technology, and health/wellness. Chingona Ventures invests in founders with a racial or ethnic minority with both cold and warm intros. She and her team have reviewed over 7,000 cold and warm inbound submissions, averaging five to six deals reviewed per day, at the time, invested in more than 40 different companies. That is such a high volume for such a lean team!

No te lo quires perder.

Follow Chingona Ventures on TikTok and Instagram: @chingonaventures

Follow Moneda Moves on Instagram: @MonedaMoves

Follow your host Lyanne Alfaro on Instagram: @LyanneAlfaro

Main podcast theme song from Premium Beat. Our music is from Epidemic Sound.

Podcast production for this episode was provided by Sarah Tulloch and her podcast production company, CCST.