Carolina Huaranca Mendoza
First Close Partners
Carolina Huaranca Mendoza is an Advisor at Kapor Capital, a seed stage fund based in Oakland, California. The firm has a portfolio of over 100 companies and has invested in companies such as Uber, Twilio, Asana, Class Dojo, MakeSchool, Swing Education, SV Academy, Aclima, EarnUp, Ethic, Thrive Market, GoodEggs, Via, Blokable, Interviewing.io, Jopwell, Tequitable, and Blavity
She was a Principal at Kapor Capital ~4 years. Carolina is a generalist investor, but the sectors she is most excited about investing in are education, future of work, future of cities, SMEs, and GovTech. During her time at Kapor she also took on an additional role as Principal & Director of Investments where she spent a portion of her time helping invest in emerging fund managers that had funds with an strong impact focus.
Carolina is passionate about ensuring that people from all backgrounds know how to navigate getting access to capital and advice to ensure their businesses scale. She began her technology career as a Sales & Product Marketing Manager at SchoolNet; which was sold to Pearson for $230MM. In 2012, she founded Spriggle, a marketplace that helped parents identify science and math inspired products for children ages 3-9. Outside of investing, she is proudest of launching one of the top performing charter school networks in the country now serving over 10,000 kids and scaling the Clubs division of Girls who Code to teach computer science to 2,000 girls in its first year.
Lastly, Carolina has a personal interest in investing in Latin American based tech startups and those with a strong presence in Latin America given that her family hails from the region. She is fluent in Spanish and continues to have close ties to the region which allows her to have strong cultural context on what types of businesses make sense of in the region.
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