About Ventera Partners

We started Ventera because we've been where you are.

We've sat in the founder's seat and on the investor side of the table. Ventera exists to give founders the inside view we had to learn the hard way.

Book the 30-minute diagnostic, $199 Why we do this

Planning a round, or stuck in one? The diagnostic, for pre-seed to Series A founders raising in the US and Canada from anywhere: a straight read on your raise on the call, and a written summary within 24 hours. Refundable before the 15-minute mark, credited in full if you continue, and not a sales call.

$100M+ raised in rounds we coached directly60+ rounds supported600+ startups coached on model and execution

Sectors we work in AI & software · intelligent hardware · physical AI · clean tech & sustainability · advanced materials

Why we do this

We learned it the hard way. You shouldn't have to.

We both came to North America to build things. We had the ideas, the technical depth and the stubbornness. What we didn't have was the network. Nobody to make the warm introduction. Nobody to tell us how an investor actually reads a deck, or to say, quietly, “that's not how it works here.” So we learned it the slow way, one polite rejection at a time.

Years later we found ourselves on the other side of the table: on investment committees, in diligence, in partner meetings. And we kept seeing the same thing. Good founders, often immigrants, often doing this for the first time, losing months to mistakes that had nothing to do with how good their company was. The playing field wasn't level. We knew, because we'd started on the wrong side of it.

Building a company is hard enough already. It takes judgment, execution, the right people and, if we're honest, a bit of luck. Nobody can hand you the luck. But the rest can be learned, and it shouldn't take years. We've been caught in the rain ourselves. Now we'd like to hold the umbrella for someone else.

There's a bigger reason, too. Every founder who makes it pays it forward. They hire, they invest, they make the next introduction for someone who needs it. Help one company get funded and the whole ecosystem gets a little stronger. That's what we want to build here.

And honestly? We love this work. We spend our days with some of the most interesting companies being built anywhere, and get to see every problem from both sides of the table. That hasn't gotten old yet.

Alex & Yvonne

Team

Investor-side insight, and deep business understanding.

Between us, we've sat on investment committees and worked in the investment and due-diligence process at six funds, on investment teams and as deal partners. We've built companies ourselves, and coached hundreds more on growth, strategy, governance and execution. We work backwards from what investors fund, and we know how to build the business that gets you there.

Alex Chen

Managing Partner

Alex is a serial entrepreneur, co-founder of QuantWave and ALCLE, and former president and current board member of CESPN. He has coached hundreds of technology companies and taken many of them from 0 to 1, and from 1 to 100.

His work centres on commercialization: turning technology into something people pay for, then into a business that scales. He has worked with early- to late-stage companies worldwide across AI and software, intelligent hardware, physical AI, clean tech and sustainability, and advanced materials, and advises enterprises on AI transformation. Founders get a partner who has sat on both sides of the table: building the company, and deciding whether to back it.

As a Venture Partner at a Boston early-stage VC, he sat on the investment committee and took part in investment decision-making, and he is currently a Deal Partner for a leading Silicon Valley venture fund. His investor network spans North America, concentrated in Silicon Valley, Boston and Toronto. Between his consulting work and his engineering PhD at the University of Waterloo, he has built a deep bench of design partners in intelligent hardware and AI.

Yvonne Wang

Managing Partner

Yvonne has taken multiple businesses through 0 to 1, and has worked inside the investment and diligence process at three funds. She brings deep insight into the full investment cycle, how investors make decisions at every level, and what narrative, materials, targeting and investor relationships have to look like for a raise to work.

She has consulted for 30+ organizations on financial, operational and growth strategy, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, top Canadian universities and large public and private companies. That rigour carries into every part of building a venture: the business model and validation, the product and go-to-market, the financials and materials, and the relationships with institutional investors and partners that carry a company forward.

Today she sources deals across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia as a Deal Partner at Boardy Ventures, for a Silicon Valley early-stage fund, and for a network of corporate and angel investors.

Investors

Companies we've supported have raised from

Venture funds and corporates

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Khosla Ventures
Draper Associates
Tencent Holdings
Amazon Climate Pledge Fund
SOSV / IndieBio
AME Cloud Ventures
1517 Fund
Fifty Years
OS Fund
Pegasus Tech Ventures
GEF Capital Partners
Graphene Ventures
BoxOne Ventures
IT Farm
Illinois Ventures
Boutique Venture Partners
BDC Capital
Brightspark Ventures
MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund
Silicon Valley Bank
J.P. Morgan

Incubators and accelerators

Y Combinator
Creative Destruction Lab
MassChallenge
Plug and Play Tech Center
Google for Startups
Level Up Labs
Imagine H2O
L Marks
Velocity (University of Waterloo)
University of Toronto
Communitech
Accelerator Centre
L-SPARK
Innovation Factory

See founder results →

Know where your raise stands.

Thirty minutes with Alex and Yvonne: a straight read on the call, and a written summary to follow.

Book the 30-minute diagnostic, $199

Fully refundable before the 15-minute mark, so there's no risk. Credited in full within 30 days toward the Fundraising Partnership, the Sprint or the GTM Strategy.

Got questions? Connect and message either of us on LinkedIn: Alex Chen or Yvonne Wang.

Not ready yet?

Short notes on raising, from both sides of the table. Book when it's time.

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