We're excited to welcome Elena Sakach (pronounced “Say-Cash”) to GV as our newest investment partner, based in our San Francisco office, where she will team with innovative founders across fintech, software, and artificial intelligence.
GV’s investors and our alumni have been fortunate to partner with a broad portfolio of incredible founders across the fintech ecosystem, including Stripe, Monzo, Plaid, Gusto, GoCardless and Ethos with notable exits such as Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), Toast (NYSE: TOST), Currencycloud (acquired by Visa), Lemonade (NYSE: LMND), and Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST). As we engaged with founders and investors about who they considered rising stars in the category, Elena's name consistently topped the list.
Elena will lead investments across sectors and stages and partner with others on new and existing portfolio companies in payments infrastructure, B2B and consumer applications, and AI-driven financial products and services.
From our first interactions with Elena, she showed up with an insatiable curiosity, off-the-charts analytical capacity, and charismatic humility. While building out GV’s Digital team, we’ve generally focused on one of two tracks: deep operating backgrounds at high-growth startups with broad curiosity (e.g., Michael McBride from GitLab, Frederique Dame from Uber, or deep investing experience with founder-like grit (e.g., Crystal Huang, KJ Sidberry, Luna Schmid, Sangeen Zeb).
Most recently, Elena was a partner at Coatue, leading investments across sectors including fintech and software. Originally from the Midwest, Elena launched a career in investment banking by cold-calling her way into Wall Street and joining Goldman Sachs in the TMT Investment Banking Division. She was recruited to join TPG's Tech Investing Practice, where she honed her focus on technology investing. Elena was promoted to partner in under one year at Coatue, ultimately leading several fintech investments and building a robust network across their founder ecosystem.
Elena shares our team's passion for learning together, exploring new areas, and partnering for the long term. She plans to push the boundaries of her core fintech and software focus to lead with a generalist mindset in new technology sectors where founders are moving the world forward.
In 2024, we'll celebrate 15 years in operation as a firm, and we're eagerly looking forward to the role Elena will play as we build GV's next chapter over the next 15 years and beyond. Welcome to the GV team, Elena!
GV’s team offsite in May 2024