Last Call: Castor Ventures

Chris has 30+ years of experience in venture capital, product development, and sales engineering. As an investor, he has deployed over $100 million into companies across all stages, from seed to growth/venture. At AV, Chris has built Castor Ventures from Fund 2 – 7 to over 150 portfolio companies. Prior to Castor, Chris was a Vice President at Edison Partners, where he focused on Enterprise 2.0 and mobile investments. Previously, Chris served as Director of Business Development at a biomedical venture accelerator and at an early-stage venture firm. Earlier in his investing career, as part of JumpStart, a nationally recognized venture development organization, Chris sourced and executed seed-stage investments. Chris received his SB in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1988 and his MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

For the past 15 years, Cainon has worked with startups as an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. Previously, he helped co-found several companies, including: Viafy (acquired by Constellation Software [TSX:CSU]), Human Design Medical (merged with Breas Medical of General Electric [NYSE:GE]), Triangle Research Labs (acquired by Lonza [SIX:LONN]), Revive Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Concordia Healthcare [TOR:CRX]), and University Laundry (acquired by a national operator, then Procter & Gamble’s Tide [NYSE: PG]). Cainon also worked at PBM Capital (a $500M healthcare-focused VC firm), Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Goldman Sachs, and NASA. He has an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a BS from the University of Virginia in Systems and Information Engineering.

Meera has 10 years of experience serving as an investor and consultant to technology startups and enterprises. Prior to Alumni Ventures, Meera was a Manager at Deloitte Consulting where she led strategy teams that advised the world’s largest technology companies. Some of her projects include optimizing a $1T global social media company’s data center operations, leading the global rebrand of a telecom provider’s cloud offerings, and building a national healthcare exchange. She led sales proposals to help a semiconductor company shift to a subscription business model and enhance AR/VR capabilities of a social media company. At Apple, Meera helped launch Apple Arcade, preparing investment materials for Tim Cook to support the acquisition of multi-million dollar games. She has also worked with several early stage venture funds focused on media, consumer technology, and health/wellness technology sectors. She has an MBA in Finance from Wharton and a BS in Management Science from SMU.