Episode 444 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Laura Rippy, Managing Partner and Board Member at Alumni Ventures.
When you see the rankings of the top VC firms, you often hear the big brands out there like Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Sequoia, Accel, and others… but did you know that one of the top 20 VC firms, as determined by CB Insights, is based in Manchester, NH? Yes – Manchvegas, where I grew up, so I find that stat of particular interest.
Founded in 2014, AV’s mission has always been to provide individual investors with professional-grade access to elite venture capital investing opportunities. It is a category that they pretty much created and it is not only working, but it is thriving.
AV is continuously listed as one of the most active VC firms with thousands of investments made and over $1.6B in committed capital. Portfolio companies include Groq, the buzzing AI chip startup; Oura, the smart ring wearable company that recently filed for an IPO; Mercor, which was most recently valued at a decacorn status; and Apollo Atomics, a company that you might recognize, as I just had their CEO on The VentureFizz Podcast a few weeks ago.
Laura comes to venture capital with a deep background as a former CEO and operator. In addition to serving on the board, Laura oversees multiple fund families at Alumni Ventures, including their Dartmouth fund called Green D Ventures, their Harvard fund called The Yard Ventures, their Women’s Fund, and US Strategic Tech Fund.
In this episode, we cover:
- Laura’s background as an operator and how she made the transition into venture capital.
- The story and model behind AV, and how they built a $1.6B+ platform that democratizes VC access for accredited investors.
- The current state of the markets in terms of trends in private vs. public markets, and high-profile portfolio stories like Oura and Northwood Space which is founded by Bridgit Mendler.
- Deep dives into the various sectors that Laura concentrates on in terms of making investments.
- How AV leverages its massive network and AI back office to add tangible value to its portfolio companies.
- What she looks for in early-stage founders and the specific deal dynamics that signal a winning investment.
- And so much more!
Transcript
Keith Cline: Laura, thanks so much for joining us.
Laura Rippy: So good to be here. Thank you.
Keith Cline: I’m excited to talk to you, and thank you for doing this for VentureFizz. You’re on national media outlets all the time, so doing this is like nothing for you! You’re on every major business talk show setting, so thank you for taking the time.
We’ve got so much to talk about because there is so much happening. I think the best leaping-off point is the state of the markets. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Where are we right now? We have all these companies hanging out by the rim waiting to go public, and then SpaceX goes and everyone thinks it’s finally going to happen. What do you see as far as companies that could go public, like Stripe—who just made a major acquisition announcement today? What is going on, Laura?
Laura Rippy: It’s a story of demand, isn’t it? Pent-up demand and an explosion that’s about to happen.
When you look from a macro perspective at how venture has evolved, we are certainly in a moment in time where companies stay private longer and longer—as in the case of SpaceX. When they finally get out there, the market realizes, “This tastes good, let’s have some more of this.”
Then you have companies in the frontier model space—like OpenAI and Anthropic—that have proven their size and capital appetite on the private side, and they are knocking on the door as well.
We are at an interesting point, but it comes back to why individual investors need to be on the private side of investing. Value appreciation happens while companies stay private so long. The example that resonates easiest for me is Oura. Do you wear an Oura ring, Keith?
Keith Cline: I do not. I have an Apple Watch, and I used to have a WHOOP, but I know what Oura is.
Laura Rippy: That’s because you’re in Boston! I should wear a WHOOP too because it’s based in Boston. But Oura was an early investment for us. We got in around the Series A at a $100 million valuation. It is now valued at $11 billion and has filed to go public.
All of that appreciation happened on the private side—in our case, with individual accredited investors who joined us at Alumni Ventures in the early days. The folks who buy into Oura once it’s public start from that $11 billion baseline. There may indeed be great growth after an IPO, but why not join that curve as a patient investor while companies are young, get in at lower valuations, and ride that stair-step up?
Keith Cline: Oura is a fascinating company, so I’m going to go off on a quick tangent. Which fund was involved, or who was the alumnus from one of the Ivies that brought that deal in? How did you get involved with Oura?
Laura Rippy: Here is the TL;DR on Alumni Ventures: We are a top-20 VC firm, and we are the only one in the top 50 that caters to individual accredited investors to give them an on-ramp to invest in venture capital.
We started about a dozen years ago in the Dartmouth community—which is close to my heart. Mike Collins founded the company on the idea that, as an individual, he wanted to invest in venture-backed rounds where capital had massive growth potential, but as an individual, he didn’t have a shot.
He built this company so individuals could join together, invest in venture-backed companies, and share in that growth. He structured it around school communities. It started with Dartmouth, and then he expanded it to Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The ball started rolling downhill, and we’ve grown significantly since.
We have diversified funds, ways for people to make individual investments, and ways for folks to collaborate in clubs with like-minded people. Today, we are north of $1.6 billion raised and north of 1,800 portfolio companies. PitchBook ranks us as one of the most active investors in the US and the third most active globally. In individual practice areas where we excel—like defense and AI—we are ranked as the most active VC firm. We’ve accomplished a lot.
Keith Cline: That’s why I was excited to talk to you for this podcast. You guys have done so much, and the Alumni Ventures story needs to be told more because it’s such a great financial vehicle.
Laura Rippy: It really is. It’s about democratizing access to venture capital. That feels so good every day. Individuals should have a chance to invest in these companies, and we provide an easy on-ramp. The minimum commitment to join us is $10,000. You have to be an accredited investor, but we try to make it approachable.
Keith Cline: What does “accredited” mean? I don’t think everyone understands what that actually entails.
Laura Rippy: We don’t set those rules—that’s the SEC. There are three paths, and you only need to meet one:
- You earn $200,000 individually per year (or $300,000 jointly if married).
- You have $1 million in net worth/assets outside of your primary residence.
- You hold certain professional financial certifications (like Series licensing).
There are roughly 20 million accredited investors in the US, and so far we have about 12,000—so there is plenty of room to grow.
Keith Cline: There’s so much opportunity there. That connects to another topic I feel strongly about. The Mass AI Coalition is doing extraordinary work to bolster the startup ecosystem in Boston. They have a pledge where individuals commit to allocating $50,000 of their net worth to local startups.
Looking back at the Boston startup scene around 2005, there was a major wave of angel and seed investing activity. That capital spawned the next generation of companies that eventually raised institutional rounds, achieved great exits, and returned capital to investors.
I hope this pledge creates that same flywheel effect. A $50,000 commitment is meaningful, but it isn’t an overwhelming amount of net worth to put to work. It will help bolster the ecosystem and deploy a large pool of capital.
Laura Rippy: Right. What is also important is highlighting key areas of focus for New England and Massachusetts.
I know you’ve had Eric Paley on the podcast before (go Dartmouth!). As a student of Massachusetts’ business evolution, I look at where we have legacy areas of expertise. Look at the robotics cluster built around iRobot—that ecosystem still exists, and those founders are still investing and building new startups. Biotech is obviously massive.
Around 2009–2010, we had a major MarTech boom with Demandware, HubSpot, and Constant Contact (I know you interviewed Gail Goodman). These industry clusters feed on themselves. Former CEOs like being in an orbit where peers are challenged by similar operational issues, and it creates a strong campus recruiting pipeline.
Defense technology is another huge area. One of the four fund families I manage is our US Strategic Tech Fund, and PitchBook ranks us as the most active VC in defense. I also run our Harvard-focused fund, Yard Ventures, and there is immense momentum around defense tech on campus at HBS and MIT. I spoke at the combined HBS/MIT National Security Conference recently, and students are fired up about building entrepreneurial solutions in service of American resilience. Combining capital with that student energy creates a great virtuous cycle for Massachusetts.
Keith Cline: Defense is a perfect industry for Massachusetts given our history with prime contractors like Raytheon.
I recently interviewed the founder of Pryzm, a company focused on helping businesses navigate the defense procurement industry. They analyze the massive defense budget documentation (the “J-Book”) to figure out exactly where the military needs suppliers, components, and services. It’s a perfect use case for AI—ingesting that massive dataset to match suppliers with RFPs. They’re backed by Andreessen Horowitz right here in Boston.
Laura Rippy: The defense opportunity is structurally critical right now. Everyone talks about lethal hardware—like drone solutions—but the underlying infrastructure is just as vital: communications, logistics, space operations, and advanced domestic manufacturing.
Those building blocks of American manufacturing are key to our resilience story. We let domestic manufacturing slide for decades. While onshoring used to be framed around domestic job politics, it is now recognized as necessary for national security after seeing global supply chain vulnerabilities. Tackling complex manufacturing challenges here using AI and robotics makes the country stronger. That broader definition of defense tech is where the real innovation lives.
Keith Cline: Absolutely. Now, we haven’t talked about your background yet. How did you get your career started?
Laura Rippy: I come to venture capital as an operator—that is in my DNA. I was a three-time CEO before this, starting early in my career in marketing.
I did my undergrad at Dartmouth, went to HBS for business school, did management consulting in between, and then spent time at Microsoft. Microsoft was a pivotal experience where I started three businesses internally. I’ve always had the startup bug. I feel fortunate to be at Alumni Ventures talking daily with founders who are changing the world.
Keith Cline: What led you to make the jump into venture capital?
Laura Rippy: A female friend of mine belonged to a firm where the two founding General Partners were looking to bring on the next generation of leadership. She asked me to join her, and my initial reaction was, “Me? In venture capital? I went to business school, but I’m an operator who gets things done! Investing doesn’t feel like me.”
Once I dug in, I realized the entrepreneurial side of building and growing a venture firm. I loved the rush of being part of multiple startup journeys simultaneously rather than just charting one company’s path.
Then I discovered Alumni Ventures’ mission of democratizing access to venture capital, which felt incredibly meaningful. Because we are a generalist firm investing across multiple sectors, the work is fascinating.
What makes Alumni Ventures unique is how we “stir the pot” between communities: we connect individual investors with active founders through our network and AI back office to help secure deal allocations and foster long-term success. That model really resonated with me.
Keith Cline: What stages and check sizes do you typically target?
Laura Rippy: Alumni Ventures is an “omnivore” firm. We invest across all stages and sectors.
About two-thirds of our primary entry points are early-stage—Seed and Series A (with a little bit of Pre-Seed). The remaining one-third is growth-stage capital, often follow-on checks into existing portfolio companies (though we occasionally join new Series B rounds and beyond).
We do not lead rounds; we are always a co-investor. We operate a matrix structure: on one axis, we have university-focused funds (like Green D for Dartmouth or Yard Ventures for Harvard). On the other axis, our team of 40 investors brings deep domain expertise across verticals like defense tech, biotech, and AI. Combining targeted domain expertise with our university connections allows us to secure allocations in competitive, market-leading deals.
Keith Cline: Is it structured like a syndicate platform?
Laura Rippy: It has evolved. We started primarily with university-centric funds, but today we offer multiple ways to participate.
Our funds are designed for individual accredited investors who hold most of their wealth in traditional public market instruments (like ETFs or mutual funds). Going into a diversified annual fund containing 20 companies gives you exposure to venture asset classes while spreading single-company risk across a portfolio. That is our core product.
On top of funds, investors can join our syndicate to back individual companies à la carte—perhaps building a targeted portfolio around a single thesis, like nuclear energy. Most investors start with a core university or thematic fund as their anchor and sprinkle individual syndicate deals on top. Today, anyone can join our university-focused funds even if they don’t hold a degree from that specific school.
We’ve lowered our minimum investment to $10,000 per allocation and scaled our operational infrastructure. Our back office processed and delivered 46,000 tax K-1s in March of this year alone! That level of back-office execution gives individual investors a seamless, professional experience.
Keith Cline: $1.6 billion raised across 12,000 individual investors is a massive operation! Most traditional VC firms run extremely lean teams, but Alumni Ventures has built significant operational scale.
Laura Rippy: We built a dedicated back office specifically designed to serve individual accredited investors, anchored primarily out of Manchester, New Hampshire. That operations hub ensures tax documents go out accurately and on time while offering robust platform support for portfolio companies. Founders look at our 12,000-member investor network and operational scale as major assets, alongside our ability to scale check sizes over time.
Keith Cline: Is your Manchester office located in one of the historic mill buildings along the Amoskeag River?
Laura Rippy: Yes! It’s a stunning piece of architecture.
Keith Cline: I need to visit! I grew up in Hooksett and went to high school in Manchester. My dad ran a leather coat factory inside those exact Amoskeag mill buildings. When I was 10 years old, my rite of passage was cleaning a 10,000-square-foot leather manufacturing floor—sweeping up leather scraps, clearing around sewing machines, and scrubbing bathrooms while other kids were outside playing! That environment taught me serious work ethic and gave me an early look at entrepreneurship.
Laura Rippy: That is incredible! Our office is at the northern end of the mills. We actually have historical photos on the walls showing the original textile operations.
Keith Cline: Switching gears, you’ve spoken publicly about the $38 trillion wealth transfer currently underway from Baby Boomers to younger generations. Can you break down what that trend means for investing?
Laura Rippy: As that $38 trillion moves down to the next generation, heirs are not going to allocate capital the same way their parents or grandparents did. They want their investments to reflect their values and drive intentional impact.
For example, I run our Women’s Fund. Female founders are historically more capital-efficient, achieve exits faster, and often raise at lower initial valuations. Investing there provides high capital efficiency alongside targeted impact. The same intentionality applies to our US Strategic Tech Fund, where investors intentionally back domestic supply chains, energy infrastructure, and manufacturing resilience.
Furthermore, public market structure has changed dramatically over the last two decades. The number of public companies has shrunk by roughly half, and traditional “small-cap” public growth stocks have largely disappeared. Meanwhile, the number of private companies with 500+ employees has quintupled.
Historically, only massive institutional funds enjoyed those private-market growth curves. Look at Amazon versus Oura: Amazon went public at roughly a $400 million valuation—which today looks like a Series C round. Oura filed to go public at an $11 billion valuation, meaning virtually all of its value creation occurred while private. Democratizing venture capital lets individual investors capture that growth curve.
Keith Cline: Speaking of Oura, it’s fascinating to see how many key operational leaders—head of revenue, marketing, and strategy—are based right here in Boston.
Laura Rippy: There is a strong health-tech and biometric tracking cluster forming here.
I recently attended a Northeastern University event on health data platforms featuring WHOOP, Eight Sleep, and academic researchers from Mass General Brigham/Harvard. They discussed how biometric hardware creates entirely new clinical datasets—such as tracking sleep metrics and body temperature shifts during menopause. When you feed those rich, real-time data streams into advanced AI models and academic research, you unlock huge medical breakthroughs. Proprietary datasets are what ultimately power the future of AI.
Keith Cline: That is the most exciting element of AI. Another great local company in your portfolio is Wasabi, led by David Friend. David is a legendary entrepreneur—he previously founded ARP, the company behind the classic synthesizer sound on The Who’s Baba O’Riley!
Laura Rippy: That is so cool!
Keith Cline: Another standout portfolio company of yours that hit the news today is Groq (spelled G-R-O-Q).
Laura Rippy: Yes, Groq with a “Q” (not Elon Musk’s Grok with a “K”)! We have been investors in Groq for a long time, with about 2,000 of our individual investors participating.
We’ve seen great momentum across our portfolio recently. We had three portfolio companies go public within a single month across nuclear, defense, and quantum technology, alongside the Oura IPO filing and Groq’s recent capital events. When you manage 1,800 portfolio companies, seeing companies transition into public markets is a core part of the lifecycle.
Keith Cline: You also backed Northwood Space, founded by former Disney star Bridgit Mendler. Her transition into space infrastructure and tech entrepreneurship is extraordinary.
Laura Rippy: We love the Northwood Space story. Satellite ground communications infrastructure was largely built in the 1990s and was designed to support only a few thousand active satellites. Satellite deployments have blown past that legacy bandwidth. Northwood Space manufactures modular ground stations to modernize satellite data transmission.
We participated in their $100 million Series B round, which was paired with a $50 million Space Force contract. The round had incredible deal dynamics: led by inside investor Catherine Boyle at Andreessen Horowitz (American Dynamism) alongside new lead investor Mina Faltas at Washington Harbor.
Bridgit Mendler’s path is remarkable. After a successful acting career on Disney’s Good Luck Charlie, she moved to Cambridge and earned a Master’s degree from MIT and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. While working with the Space Force, she identified the ground infrastructure bottleneck and co-founded Northwood Space with her CTO.
She exemplifies how female founders are building deeply technical startups. In our Women’s Fund, we see female founders with technical PhDs tackling hard engineering, infrastructure, and defense problems. The push for women in STEM over the last two decades is paying massive dividends.
Keith Cline: Have overall venture funding statistics for female founders improved?
Laura Rippy: Having a long-term view as a former CEO, I can tell you it used to be much worse. Decades ago, I attended executive conferences where out of 500 attendees, I was the only female CEO in the booklet.
However, macro funding statistics still need to move significantly. Female check-writers represent roughly 10% of venture partners. Solely female-founded startup teams still receive only about 2% of overall VC dollars, while co-ed founding teams raise around 20%. That means 80% of venture dollars still flow to all-male founding teams. That dynamic has to change, but seeing technical, category-defining companies like Northwood Space succeed builds the role models needed to accelerate progress.
Keith Cline: When evaluating early-stage opportunities, what key criteria do you look for?
Laura Rippy: We view every investment like a four-layer cake with icing:
- Layer 1: A stellar, adaptable team.
- Layer 2: An enormous addressable market.
- Layer 3: Defensible IP or competitive moats.
- Layer 4: Early signals of explosive traction.
Those four layers are table stakes for any VC firm. The “icing” on top for Alumni Ventures is evaluating the lead investor and analyzing the round’s deal dynamics.
We look for lead investors who demonstrate sharp conviction. For example, we once evaluated three separate deals led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures. In two of those deals, the lead check was small relative to the round size—indicating a defensive follow-on rather than aggressive conviction. We passed on those two. On the third deal, Khosla wrote a dominant check to squeeze out other investors and claim maximum allocation. That clear signal of conviction gave us the green light to co-invest alongside them.
That co-investment strategy has delivered strong results. Measuring our track record from 2017 to 2024, our distributions to paid-in capital (DPI) consistently rank in the top decile (and occasionally top quartile) across the industry.
Keith Cline: How does your 12,000-investor network directly add value to portfolio companies?
Laura Rippy: Our broader ecosystem reaches nearly one million people, anchored by 12,000 accredited investors who represent executive leaders across corporate America—CFOs, CMOs, medical practice leaders, and law partners.
We leverage an AI platform to facilitate double-opt-in warm introductions between portfolio founders and enterprise decision-makers.
For instance, we backed a Silicon Valley B2B software startup whose lead board member had deep enterprise software expertise, but limited connections within medical technology—which turned out to be the startup’s primary target market. We tapped our network to host intimate, curated dinners in major hubs like Dallas, Minneapolis, and Boston with top med-tech C-level executives. That network access gives early-stage companies a massive go-to-market advantage.
Keith Cline: What do you expect out of a first pitch meeting with a founder?
Laura Rippy: Pitching starts before the actual meeting! We value a warm introduction and a clear pre-read deck so our team can get smart on the business beforehand.
In the meeting, I look for:
- Command of the Business: Deep operational understanding of market levers and growth metrics.
- Vision & Storytelling: The ability to distill a complex vision so compellingly that I can easily remember it and repeat it. If you can’t sell the vision to an investor, you won’t be able to recruit top talent or land customers.
- Complementary Team: A cohesive core team with balanced skill sets.
- Customer Validation: Early, real-world customer feedback showing product iteration.
Keith Cline: What are your go-to podcast and book recommendations for entrepreneurs?
Laura Rippy: My top book recommendation is Range: How Generalists Succeed in a World of Specialists by David Epstein. As a generalist operator with a liberal arts background and an MBA, I love how Epstein illustrates how cross-disciplinary pattern recognition drives success.
For podcasts, I regularly listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Invest Like the Best, The Daily, and of course, The VentureFizz Podcast!
Keith Cline: I was waiting for that! What do you enjoy doing for fun outside of work?
Laura Rippy: I love Pilates, hot yoga, weightlifting, and running. As the seasons change, I do a lot of hiking. I’m an avid reader, and living in Boston, I walk to work and enjoy exploring the city without a car. I pinch myself every day—it’s an exciting time to be building.
Keith Cline: Laura, thank you so much for walking us through the Alumni Ventures story and sharing your insights.
Laura Rippy: Absolutely! Thanks, Keith.
