AMA: Pranavi Cheemakurti — Understanding the world's biggest problems

Hola! I'm Pranavi and I'm on the investment team at Acceleprise Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage B2B SaaS venture fund, and accelerator with offices in San Francisco, New York and Toronto. Prior to Acceleprise, I did early stage investing at VU Venture Partners, and at a female founder focused accelerator in the Bay Area. In a previous life, I spent some time on the trading floor at RBC Capital Markets and started a public health startup while in college called MilkyWay. I'm also involved in the public sector - most recently as a delegate to the UN Youth Assembly and UN DPI/NGO summit representing Canada and MilkyWay and has been involved with multiple different non-profits. 

The reason I love the tech/venture ecosystem and my job specifically is that I get to dream about the future. I want to dedicate my career to understanding and helping solve the world's biggest problems, whether it be as an investor, builder, writer, academic, or whatever else. To me, the world of B2B software has been an excellent learning ground in my pursuit of this goal because there's so much cutting edge stuff that's happening especially in areas like digital health, remote work, privacy and logistics that greatly improve the lives and livelihoods of many. 

 As a young person and a woman of colour in venture, I am deeply passionate about using my position as an investor to enable the reallocation of wealth and capital to more underrepresented founders so that solutions can be built that cater to the needs of everyone and not a select few. As the daughter of immigrants and a first-generation Canadian, I firmly believe that most underrepresented folks who would be excellent founders are priced out of a career in entrepreneurship. I spend a lot of time thinking about how the tech ecosystem can and should reallocate capital and resources so more underrepresented folks become entrepreneurs and how I can use my position as a VC to accomplish this.

In addition to my day job, I moonlight as a writer and researcher talking about people and society, emerging markets, socio-economic issues, and very occasionally, Silicon Valley. When I'm not working on my various (read: too many) side projects, you can find me learning to cook, tweeting about useless things, ranting about the book I'm reading currently, or binge watching something on Netflix. Hit her up to talk with any and all questions on fundraising for B2B founders, diversity in tech and resources for underrepresented founders, politics, people and society and books!

Let’s get started!

Republic Venture Partner AMA (Ask Me Anything) is a weekly series. Feel free to ask questions in the discussion section below.* He will be answering questions Wednesday 8/19 through Friday 8/21 so submit your questions now!

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This educational article is provided by Republic to help its users understand this area of the market, it should not be construed as investment advice as it is impersonal, disinterested and was produced by Republic for Republic’s users, without remuneration received or expected.