Firm overview
Hannah Grey is a first-check fund investing in customer-centric founders who are reimagining everyday experiences to improve work and life. Founding partners Kate Shillo Beardsley and Jessica Peltz Zatulove are firm builders with a seven-year working relationship and a combined 18 years of institutional venture investing. Their track record is top decile and spans 50+ investments and 22 exits, including breakout companies such as Venmo (acquired by Braintree), Lively (acquired by Wacoal), Self, Genies, Billie, Hipcamp, Stream, Paperless Post, Eight Sleep, Netomi, and Catch & Release.
Kate Beardsley started her career as Chief of Staff to Martha Stewart and later worked for Ken Lerer, Co-Founder of The Huffington Post. She was a Founding Member of Lerer Hippeau, NYC’s most active seed fund, where she helped manage Fund I-III with active involvement in 200+ investments- including Warby Parker, Casper, Glossier, Barkbox, and several more. She later became the Managing Partner at Upslope Ventures in Colorado which spun out of Galvanize. Jessica Peltz Zatulove was a Partner at CVC MDC Ventures, where she invested in early-stage enterprise software addressing the needs of the Modern CMO. She is Co-Founder of Women in VC, a global community for women in venture which includes over 3,300 female investors, representing more than 2,000 venture funds, located across more than 60 countries.
Hannah Grey is named after their oldest daughters, Raya Hannah and Gunnison Grey.
Firm strategy
Hannah Grey is taking a data informed, thesis driven approach to understand how changes in consumer and worker behavior create areas of outsized opportunity. This includes exploring investment themes within SaaS, Commerce, Fintech, Wellness, Education, Consumer, Marketplaces, and the Future of Work. With an emphasis on creating an excellent customer experience, Kate and Jessica leverage their operating experience in marketing to help startups build fanatic customer communities, design world class branding, and identify creative acquisition channels. Hannah Grey is also pioneering a progressive stance to generate liquidity, taking a proactive approach to engineering cash returns with a strategic playbook they call Modern Liquidity Management.
Why we invested
We invested in Hannah Grey because their team has a winning combination of acumen, a unique approach to supporting early-stage companies, and a focus on driving alignment among their limited partners, founders, and co-investors. When you meet a team like Kate and Jessica, you know you are witnessing an incredible journey take flight. We are impressed by their relentless pursuit of optimal outcomes at each stage of growth, including their ability to highly curate the global venture landscape for founders, leveraging the community they built through Women in VC. Kate and Jessica are taking an unconventional approach that is grounded in their extensive venture experience across five institutional funds. We are excited to partner with this team.