We are thrilled to unveil Unshackled's Venture Partner Program! We’re launching this new program in collaboration with seven exceptional founders from our portfolio. These individuals — purposely chosen not only for their impact on Unshackled's internal community but also as beacons of inspiration for immigrant founders across the United States — now join our team as Venture Partners.
Our Venture Partners are seasoned entrepreneurs who intimately comprehend the challenges and triumphs of the entrepreneurial path. On a personal level, they also understand the profound significance of having Unshackled as an early supporter of their founder journeys – experiencing firsthand the empowerment that comes with being able to build and innovate freely in the United States.
In their role as Venture Partners, they will play a pivotal role in amplifying Unshackled's impact; ensuring Unshackled’s work unlocks more immigrant ambition. At its core, this program is rooted in our belief that, through our community, we have the power to bring more immigrant founders into our network to support them in unlocking their entrepreneurial journeys. The Venture Partners will contribute their insights, knowledge, and support, fostering an environment where immigrant founders can thrive.
Join us in welcoming the seven incredible additions to our team: Amelie Vavrovsky, Brendan Playford, Isoken Igbinedion, Michelle Tan, Miri Buckland, Purva Gupta, and Tony Martens.
The Unshackled Ventures Team
Immigrants Start Here.
Meet the Venture Partners
Amélie Vavrovsky is the founder and CEO of Formally, a platform designed to simplify legal work, with a current focus on US immigration. At the heart of Formally is the mission to “make paperwork suck less” and streamline legal processes through easy-to-use design, secure portable data, and responsible AI. This venture is personal for Amélie; inspired by her own journey through US immigration, she's determined to make law accessible and delightful.
Amélie holds 2 masters degrees from Stanford University and was part of the inaugural cohort of AI graduate fellows at Stanford HAI, where she focused on the ethics and practical applications of legal AI. She is the youngest-ever recipient of the Stanford CodeX Fellowship for legal technology and was recently named Forbes' 30 Under 30 as well as a 2023 American Bar Association Women in Legal Tech Honoree for her work on Formally.
As the co-founder of Masa Finance and a background in Physics from UCL, Brendan Playford started his journey into web3 by mining Bitcoin and Dogecoin in late 2013. With nothing more than 4 GPUs, a profitable hobby grew to become a large mining hardware distribution store on eBay with 7 figures of monthly revenue. Coming from a small village of just 50 people in the UK, the opportunity to move to the US, chase the American Dream, and join the startup grind in San Francisco was only made possible by being an early believer in Bitcoin as an open, accessible store of value, open to all and owned by no one.
Brendan founded Constellation in 2017, an early 'Ethereum killer' that scaled horizontally through a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) architecture, and following the crypto winter, Brendan co-founded Pngme, a credit and lending API for banks, fintechs, and credit bureaus in Africa, backed by Unshackled. Handing over the reins to a CEO on the continent in Kenya, and once again backed by Unshackled, Brendan went on to found Masa with a vision to bring open and accessible access to data and data infrastructure in the age of AI. With over 100 partners including Polygon, zkSync, and over 43,000 nodes and 1.3 million users on the network, Masa is the leading data provider for the new wave of decentralized AI startups that are growing exponentially. Masa is in the process of going public with its token through CoinList and fully sold out a 6x oversubscribed public sale of $8.75M in 32 mins in March.
Isoken Igbinedion, an MBA graduate from The University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School and former Microsoft Product Marketing Manager (PMM), has a rich background in omni-channel distribution and supply chain innovation. Starting her career at Target, she quickly advanced to Amazon, playing a pivotal role in the design of the PrimeNow 1-2 hour fulfillment offering as one of its first team members. Following Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market, Isoken contributed significantly to the PrimeNow and Whole Foods Operations Integration team, focusing on scaling that new delivery offering in new markets and leading product strategy for order fulfillment and workforce management software applications.
As the Co-Founder & CEO of Parfait, Isoken is at the forefront of revolutionizing the supply chain for wigs and extensions. Parfait leverages cutting-edge artificial intelligence, alongside next-generation manufacturing and robotics technology, to re-invent consumer experiences. Parfait’s mission is to develop beauty experiences, with technology, that recognize and prioritize all people. Born in Nigeria, Iso and her family immigrated to the US when she was very young.
Michelle Tan is an experienced founder and operator. She has years of experience bringing technology and innovation to traditional industries with compelling social visions. Michelle helped raise over $200M as the first director of finance at Culdesac and was previously at WeWork and Evercore. The last company she co-founded, Unearth AI, a location analytics platform, was backed by Unshackled Ventures.
Michelle grew up in Beijing, China, and moved to the U.S. when she was 18 to study at Columbia University. She graduated with a degree in Economics and a minor in History. She is currently attending Harvard Business School while exploring her next idea.
Miri Buckland is the COO and co-founder of LANDING, Gen Z’s Pinterest. As someone who discovered her identity as a ‘creative’ later in life, Miri is on a mission to empower everyone to be and feel creative. Together with her team, she is developing LANDING’s platform to ignite creativity across its growing +500k global community.
By trade, Miri is a marketer, community builder and consumer tech operator. Prior to co-founding LANDING and moving to the United States, Miri held roles at Sky TV in her hometown of London and later worked in venture capital in San Francisco. Miri was a 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and a Graduate of Stanford University School of Business.
Purva Gupta is the Co-founder & CEO of Lily AI, a retail technology company empowering retailers and brands by bridging the gap between merchant-speak and customer-speak. Leveraging a proprietary suite of AI purpose-built for retail, Lily AI enhances shopping experiences by injecting consumer-centric language throughout the entire retail value chain.
Purva began her career at Saatchi and Saatchi where she developed her passion for retail while working with P&G and witnessing the strength of the emotional connection people had to their preferred products. Inspired by consumer innovation, Purva joined Eko, a branchless banking and mobile payments platform serving the unbanked and funded by the Gates Foundation. Before launching Lily, Purva was with UNICEF Ventures’ Innovation Fund investing in life-saving apps and technologies.
Purva is an immigrant founder who has been on 6 visas in the last 5 years to live her American dream. She is a Tory Burch Fellow and holds an MBA from Indian School of Business and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce (India).
As the co-founder of Plantible Foods, Tony Martens has been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge agri-food manufacturing platforms. Plantible is recognized for its pioneering work in leveraging sustainable and nutrient-dense plants to produce food compounds that surpass current industry standards in nutrition and functionality. This groundbreaking work not only addresses pressing global food challenges but also sets a new benchmark for sustainability and quality in the food industry.
Before embarking on the entrepreneurial journey with Plantible, Tony amassed extensive experience in management consulting within his home country of the Netherlands, specializing in agricultural commodity supply chain management. One of the notable achievements includes leading a transformative project for a southern German agricultural company, catapulting it into becoming one of Europe’s largest commodity companies. As a result of Tony and his colleagues work, the company saw an unprecedented 700% increase in revenue in a period for three years.
About Unshackled Ventures: Unshackled Ventures is the only early-stage venture capital fund that enables unrecognized and excluded immigrant founders to start companies in the U.S. Since its founding in 2014, Unshackled has proven its thesis that investing and supporting this population drives strong investment returns across key industries, including American infrastructure, generative AI, healthcare, space, and enterprise SaaS. To date, the firm has invested in 80 companies and over 200 entrepreneurs.