Women in AI Series II: Why Startups Need to be AI-Native

Ray is a seasoned venture capitalist with over 20 years of investing experience across a wide range of industries and geographies. Before joining Alumni Ventures, Ray was a partner and adviser at several global venture funds focusing on AI, Web3, FinTech and SaaS investment opportunities across the U.S. and Asia Pacific. Earlier, he spent more than 10 years in the corporate venture space: He was the managing director of HP’s new business ventures, responsible for startup technology evaluation, new business incubation, VC relationships, and minority investments, and earlier at Cisco Systems, holding several senior positions leading investment, M&A, internal incubation, and global consulting. Previously, Ray was a managing partner of a leading Internet consulting firm working with Fortune 1000 companies across North America. He earned a dual MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn has more than 30 years of experience as a technology executive and a transformational leader. She is currently the President of Claridad-LLC, a product and services technology company. She is also on the boards of Xylem Inc a digital water company, Edison International/SCE a green energy company and Columbus McKinnon an intelligent movement company. Additionally, Jeanne is a director of Descartes Labs an AI, a start-up and leader in geospatial platform intelligence. Prior to this she spent 22 years at Cisco building the company and scaling it globally. Her leadership roles were VP/GM in SaaS, Services/Products, head of Product Marketing, GM of Consulting and head of Global Sales/Partners. Before Cisco, she built and ran Micronics Computers with a successful exit. She started her career in designing secure infrastructure/systems, addressing the world’s top government agencies. Jeanne is a broad business and technology executive with deep experience in IoT and scaling and building global tech infrastructure. She built businesses in cyber, compute, cloud, SaaS, AI, networking, collaboration, IoT and services. She has extensive sales/ marketing and M&A experience as well as leadership development expertise. Jeanne is an NACD fellow and recognized as – 50 Most Influential Women in Business, 5X Stevie winner, published author. Trailblazer recognition by M2M, Women’s Inc. Most Influential Directors. She holds a B.S. from UMass and a graduate of both MITs Executive Leadership program and Harvard’s Accelerated MBA program for executives.
www.claridad-llc.com

In her role at Intel Capital, Elana invests in Deep Tech, Edge Intelligence, Enterprise/SaaS, and AI Applications companies. Elana led and was involved in investments in Formant, Skylo, Deep Sentinel, Pixeom (acquired by Siemens), Rubikloud (acquired by Kinaxis), Teikametrics, Venafi (acquired by Thoma Bravo), Fictiv, and other stealth mode companies. Elana currently serves as board director or observer at Formant, Skylo, Teikametrics, Deep Sentinel, Hypersonix, and Mirantis. Previously, she served as Director/Observer at Pixeom, Bossa Nova, and Venafi. Prior to Intel Capital, Elana began her career working in Engineering, Product and Business Development roles across the high-tech industry. She is a Kauffman Fellow and received her MBA from Kellogg School of Management, and holds BS & MS degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Toronto and Tufts University, respectively.