Welcoming the next generation of Two Sigma Ventures

By Frances Schwiep and Villi Iltchev on April 14, 2022

As we look to build a generational venture capital firm, one of our top priorities is to support our talent and develop the next generation of venture capital leaders to support founders and strengthen Two Sigma Ventures. To that end, we’re thrilled to announce the promotion of Kyra Durko and Vinay Iyengar to Principal, and to welcome Gabriella Garcia to the team.

Kyra and Vinay have each made extensive contributions to Two Sigma Ventures and we want to share some of the highlights:

Since joining us in 2018, Kyra has played a key role in sourcing, evaluating and supporting startups across FinTech, healthcare, and enterprise software. Drawing from her previous experience as a founder in the payments space, Kyra has helped shape the firm’s thinking around infrastructure and go to market strategies for fintechs. Her ability to empathize and build deep relationships with founders has been crucial in supporting and sourcing investments in companies across these verticals such as Nelo, Tive, Castor, Xilis and Sora.

Beyond investing, Kyra has pushed our team to redefine what it means to support founders and add value to the startup ecosystem. In 2019, Kyra set out to create a new type of founder community that didn’t just provide professional value, but also created a space that enabled founders to prioritize their personal wellbeing. Today, Founder League is a community of 300+ NYC founders that brings members together for free weekly workouts and coffee meetups. Kyra also launched our interview series that democratizes the expertise of operators who are on the front lines of building companies and watching sector trends unfold. Past interviews include the CFO of Carta, the Head of Benefits at Docusign, and the former Head of Credit at Nubank.

Vinay joined us in 2020 to help us build out our West Coast team in San Francisco and share with our portfolio his extensive experience in launching and scaling technical products. In just under 2 years with TSV, Vinay has helped lead investments in Remote, Replicated, TextBlaze, MonetizeNow, Anomalo, and Okteto, an impressive portfolio spanning the entire enterprise software stack, from apps to data and cloud infra. In particular, he has served as a Board Observer for both Remote and Okteto, becoming an invaluable resource to those founding teams in scaling their businesses, making key hires, and thinking through company strategy.

He has been a key member of our investment team and brings to bear a thoughtful, rigorous and data-driven approach to sourcing new deals and analyzing new opportunities. Of particular note is Vinay’s excellent written content, which has become frequently cited in the broader startup ecosystem. He is the architect of our Open Source Index and has authored a number of our most popular posts, including those on Model Performance Monitoring and the JAMstack. His startup job guide, intended to help young professionals land their dream jobs, has received nearly 100k views. As a Principal, Vinay will continue to focus on seed and series A b2b software investments for the team and looks forward to continuing to explore his interests in applied machine learning and developer/creator tools, while exploring new interest areas such as robotics and climate tech.

We would also like to welcome a new Investor to our team, Gabriella Garcia, who brings experience as a mechanical engineer, software engineer and product manager to the team. Most recently, Gabriella worked as the Product Management Lead for Banking on Google’s Payments Platform, which powers payments across Google products including Adwords, Play Store, YouTube and Google Cloud. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and gained internship experience at Facebook and Apple. Based in New York, Gabriella will focus on early-stage investments across a variety of verticals including FinTech, crypto, enterprise software, and healthcare. Please join us in welcoming her to the team!

*View all TSV investments here.