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Clara Brenner shared thisThe Urban Innovation Fund hosted a happy hour at Brucato earlier this week, and it was a great night! Delicious cocktails & mocktails, way too much food, and a room full of people we like. Thank you to our sponsors -- CodigoDelSur, Sensiba LLP, Juniper Square, and HSBC Innovation Banking -- for making it happen. It was so nice to get our team in one place with other nice VCs, friends of the firm, and our portfolio founders. Also: Julie Lein was so busy running around talking to people that she ate a chicken croquette without noticing -- which would be unremarkable except that she's a pescatarian 🫣. She was having too good a time to keep track. Sorry Jules! I won't tell anyone. cc: Andrew Felbinger Jenieri Cyrus Misha Kelly Jeff Stark Lucía Facchin Pablo Arismendes Fiona Wu Darren Smith Jim Marshall
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Clara Brenner shared thisWhen Jenieri Cyrus plans a team activity for the Urban Innovation Fund, you should bring a knee brace 🙌 Our team took a well-earned break from the office today for some fun — there were lasers, basketball, trivia, and a game I still don’t totally understand involving an evil eye. Shoutout to Julie Lein for coming fully prepared (respect the brace), Andrew Felbinger for mastering the picture challenge, and to Jenieri for organizing such a fun afternoon! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pass out.
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Clara Brenner shared thisQuarterly reminder that the best market intelligence doesn't come from reports -- it comes from Sloanies at lunch 😃 Loved hosting our Bay Area VC group again today. And thank you to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for the generous sponsorship. We couldn't do it without you! cc: MIT Sloan School of Management Brian Appel Roy Argand Julie Lein Elizabeth Yin Parul Singh Gus Tai Brent Wu, CFA Vinit Sukhija Sally Y. Liu Rachel Sheinbein Divya Raghavan Emily Yu Glenn Borok Jimmy Park
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Clara Brenner shared thisWe gathered a group of Urban Innovation Fund portfolio founders and investor friends for an off-the-record conversation about raising capital in 2026. It was both delicious & fun! We talked about the milestones that actually move investors right now and how to run a tight fundraising process. We also covered hiring strategies and Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE (thanks Parul Singh for educating me). We host these kinds of dinners regularly for our founders and insight-friendly investors. Julie Lein, Andrew Felbinger, Jenieri Cyrus and I find that sometimes the message hits differently coming from someone else 😅 Can't wait for the next one. And a special thank you to our sponsors Safa Aliabadi and Ryan Koch! #FounderCommunity #VentureCapital cc: Arek Zarowski Simon Wu Rollins Stallworth III Varun Jain Anne Wen Jeff Ponchick Spencer Schneier Shan Mohta Shannon Beckham Luca Springer Karine Mellata Penelope Jones Matt Pauker
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Clara Brenner shared thisJulie Lein and I are thrilled to announce that Andrew Felbinger has been promoted to Partner at the Urban Innovation Fund. Andrew joined us as an Associate back in September 2018 and, since then, he's become a valuable part of our team. He's developed into a creative deal sourcer with a keen eye for exceptional founders and companies, and we're excited to see what opportunities he brings us next. Beyond his investing skills, Andrew has enriched our firm culture in countless ways – including sourcing some gems for our company book club like "The Ride of a Lifetime" and "1929: The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History" (yes, he has range!). At the Urban Innovation Fund, we believe in building long-term relationships – with the founders we back and with the people on our team. There's something special about celebrating a milestone like this with someone we've grown alongside for more than seven years. Andrew's journey from Associate to Partner reflects the kind of partnership we value: grounded in trust, collaboration, and shared commitment to doing great work together. Congratulations, Andrew. Here's to the next chapter!
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Clara Brenner shared thisEach year, we publish the Urban Outcomes Report to capture the real-world impact of our portfolio companies in cities around the globe. The 2025 edition combines quantitative data and founder stories, spotlighting innovations from modernized government permitting to AI-driven healthcare and sustainable finance. This project is truly a labor of love for me 💛. And it gives me the opportunity to reflect on the ripple effects of the companies we back, and how their work moves from idea to reality, from pilot to breakout company. Thank you to Terry Rohrbach at Fort for helping me pull the report together. And to our team for helping source these awesome companies! Julie Lein, Andrew Felbinger, Jenieri Cyrus
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Clara Brenner shared thisSummers can be a little quiet, so the Urban Innovation Fund hosted a happy hour to spice things up. Portfolio companies + some of our favorite VCs + cocktails = the best. And my broken foot did not slow me down much, as I had Julie Lein, Jenieri Cyrus, and Andrew Felbinger to prop me up. Thank you so Judy L. at Citizens and Darren Smith at Juniper Square for sponsoring the fun :)
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Clara Brenner shared thisHad such a great time hosting Sloanie alum VCs for breakfast last week! Julie Lein Rachel Sheinbein Eric Rosenblum Vinit Sukhija Elizabeth Yin James Cham Justin Ashton Emily Yu May Robison Thank you John Griffin at Andersen for sponsoring :) There are about forty of us in the Bay Area, and we’ve been meeting quarterly for four years now! It was all the brainchild of Preetish Nijhawan, who I miss dearly. MIT Sloan School of Management #vc #sloanie
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Clara Brenner shared thisThis morning, Julie Lein and I gathered with a group of founders and investors for an off-the-record breakfast discussion on one of the most talked-about topics in tech: AI. At the Urban Innovation Fund, we back the entrepreneurs shaping the future of our communities, and it’s clear that AI has the potential to accelerate their impact. What stood out today was a shared desire to get practical. We talked extensively about AI tools and tactics startups can use internally to accelerate their operations and speed to market. It's "AI accelerated" or bust. Grateful to everyone who joined us and to Andersen for making the morning possible :) Spencer Schneier Karine Mellata Harrison Lieberfarb Michael Storan Nancy Xiao Ramy Adeeb Jonathan Allen Srikar Chinam Janna (Wandzilak) Colucci Casey Donahue Pelu Tran Luca Springer Sebastian Vargas Giedrius Daubaris Jade Fang
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3w
Gooooo Healey Cypher!!
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisWith the recent headlines about frontier model cyberhacking, everyone’s talking about liability for agentic AI, meaning who's on the hook when an agent goes wrong. I, like many others, think principal-agent frameworks give us a fairly workable answer there. But I see a harder problem somewhere else: agents break the model-centric approach that AI regulation has been built on so far. Compute thresholds were always a proxy. The assumption is that more FLOPs means more capability, and more capability means more potential for harm. But a group of smaller models working together can cause significant harm even when none of them crosses the threshold we've chosen for regulating general-purpose AI models. The real risk sits in the system, not the individual model. Additionally, liability can help hold the right people accountable, but liability only applies after the harm has already happened. Ideally we'd stop the harm from happening in the first place. That brings me to a spicy take I've shared in a few talks: the ecosystem isn't ready for agentic AI. We don't have common, agreed-upon protocols for agent identity verification and authorization. Companies are building their own in isolation, some for e-commerce and some for specific industries, but no single standard has been generally accepted. That kind of foundation is what lets agents operate safely, verifiably, and accurately. So if you're wondering where your research could make a real difference right now, I'd point you here: identity, authorization, and system-level risk. The next frontier isn't just the next model.
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisNow that’s the kinda text message you like waking up to from Jordan B.. On the heels of our $110M fundraise announcement, we had our best revenue day ever yesterday to end the quarter. Congrats Gustavo Gorenstein , Haizea Caravaca Garmendia , Roberto Alvarez Cadavieco (Rori) ! There’s never been a better time to join Jeeves and we are hiring across the globe 🌍 for 40+ roles! 🦁🚀💪 One that is top of mind for me is a Global Head of Partnerships (ideally w prior crypto and b2b background) aka someone that moves fast and can adjust to the complexities of building across 35 countries. If this sounds like you, drop me a quick DM or email, and share something cool you’ve built w AI lately - the more weird the better! 🤖👀 👉 tryjeeves.com/us/about-us
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Clara Brenner reacted on thisHuge congrats to Urban Innovation Fund portfolio co Jeeves & Dileep on this awesome milestone! 🤑 $110M raised to scale the future of global business banking! 🏦Clara Brenner reacted on thisExcited to announce our $110M raise to scale our stablecoin-native banking platform for global enterprises across 35 countries (10 new countries!) 🔥🦁 Our stablecoin business crossed $1.5B annualized volume in just 8 months, driven by enterprise demand. Since signing the Series C-1 term sheet, revenue has grown more than 50% in a few months. Our pace is accelerating. As we go deeper into the stablecoin ecosystem, I'm pumped to have CoinFund lead the round, joined by AllianceBernstein, Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, CRV, GIC, Global PayTech Ventures, Financial Technology Partners / FT Partners, ParaFi Capital, SquareOne Capital, Vista, Wintermute Ventures, Y Combinator and others. Also grateful to have the best founders building in the space joining the round: Zach Abrams (Bridge, OUSD), Sean Neville (Circle, Catena), 🏕️ Henri Stern (Privy), Prabhakar Reddy & Karan Shah (OpenFX), Sam Broner (Better Money Co.) and Ricardo Marino (Global Chairman at Itaú), among others. Over the last year, AI & stablecoins have powered us to an inflection point. Today, we have fewer employees than we did two years ago, while revenue and volume have grown more than 10x crossing $5B in annualized TPV. AI is embedded across Jeeves and has fundamentally changed how we build and operate. Alongside the round, we're launching: 💸 Jeeves stablecoin wallets: Our custom built wallets supporting USDC and USDT, with payouts to 190 countries, all in one platform. 💳 Cards in 10 more countries: Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Panama, Guatemala and others. The same award winning expense management platform used by BMW, Burger King and H&M is now available in these markets. 🧾 Accounts Receivable (AR): Alongside our core Cards and AP modules, we're launching our AR module, starting with Brazil 🇧🇷 This was one of the biggest customer requests! 📊 Jeeves Global AI Spend Tracker: We all know AI spend is growing but if you operate in six countries, with Claude spend in pesos & OpenAI spend in pounds, how do you actually know what you spent across models, countries, currencies & what drives ROI? Well now you do with our Global AI spend tracker across the globe 🌎 🇪🇸 Lastly, we opened our doors in Madrid to accelerate our expansion across EMEA, with a focus on stablecoin payment corridors between Europe & the world. The next decade of global banking will be agentic and seamless between stablecoin and fiat. To build this companies need to own the primitives directly. This chapter is being written right now, and small teams with big ambition, powered by AI and stablecoins, will write it. We intend to be the company that defines it 🌎 Thank you to our customers, teammates and investors for the trust you put in us every day 🙏 If you want to shape the future of global money at the cutting edge of stablecoins and AI, come build with us. It won't be easy but it will be fun 👉 https://lnkd.in/e_eytQUt Day one of this next chapter starts now. It's time to build.
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisExcited to announce our $110M raise to scale our stablecoin-native banking platform for global enterprises across 35 countries (10 new countries!) 🔥🦁 Our stablecoin business crossed $1.5B annualized volume in just 8 months, driven by enterprise demand. Since signing the Series C-1 term sheet, revenue has grown more than 50% in a few months. Our pace is accelerating. As we go deeper into the stablecoin ecosystem, I'm pumped to have CoinFund lead the round, joined by AllianceBernstein, Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, CRV, GIC, Global PayTech Ventures, Financial Technology Partners / FT Partners, ParaFi Capital, SquareOne Capital, Vista, Wintermute Ventures, Y Combinator and others. Also grateful to have the best founders building in the space joining the round: Zach Abrams (Bridge, OUSD), Sean Neville (Circle, Catena), 🏕️ Henri Stern (Privy), Prabhakar Reddy & Karan Shah (OpenFX), Sam Broner (Better Money Co.) and Ricardo Marino (Global Chairman at Itaú), among others. Over the last year, AI & stablecoins have powered us to an inflection point. Today, we have fewer employees than we did two years ago, while revenue and volume have grown more than 10x crossing $5B in annualized TPV. AI is embedded across Jeeves and has fundamentally changed how we build and operate. Alongside the round, we're launching: 💸 Jeeves stablecoin wallets: Our custom built wallets supporting USDC and USDT, with payouts to 190 countries, all in one platform. 💳 Cards in 10 more countries: Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Panama, Guatemala and others. The same award winning expense management platform used by BMW, Burger King and H&M is now available in these markets. 🧾 Accounts Receivable (AR): Alongside our core Cards and AP modules, we're launching our AR module, starting with Brazil 🇧🇷 This was one of the biggest customer requests! 📊 Jeeves Global AI Spend Tracker: We all know AI spend is growing but if you operate in six countries, with Claude spend in pesos & OpenAI spend in pounds, how do you actually know what you spent across models, countries, currencies & what drives ROI? Well now you do with our Global AI spend tracker across the globe 🌎 🇪🇸 Lastly, we opened our doors in Madrid to accelerate our expansion across EMEA, with a focus on stablecoin payment corridors between Europe & the world. The next decade of global banking will be agentic and seamless between stablecoin and fiat. To build this companies need to own the primitives directly. This chapter is being written right now, and small teams with big ambition, powered by AI and stablecoins, will write it. We intend to be the company that defines it 🌎 Thank you to our customers, teammates and investors for the trust you put in us every day 🙏 If you want to shape the future of global money at the cutting edge of stablecoins and AI, come build with us. It won't be easy but it will be fun 👉 https://lnkd.in/e_eytQUt Day one of this next chapter starts now. It's time to build.
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Clara Brenner reacted on thisClara Brenner reacted on thisNoa Argamani spent 246 days in Hamas captivity. Since then, she's spent much of her time being asked to revisit what happened to her. In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, she tells her story about what comes next. "This interview is so special cuz [we're] focused on back to life and rising from hell," she tells my colleague Melia. This month, she started a new job. Argamani has joined the venture capital firm Vine Ventures, which backs early-stage startups, especially in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and defense tech. She's working with Israeli founders and companies looking to grow their business in the United States. Her new role puts her contact list to work: Her ordeal thrust her onto a global stage, connecting her to world leaders and business titans alike. "In this moment, if I want to learn and make an impact, VC is the right place for me," she says. "I want to be surrounded by people who dream big." Read more about Noa's story here: https://lnkd.in/gzvPnnbe
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisMonterra AI is now a licensed engineering firm. Over the past couple of years, Monterra's SaaS product has helped contractors, EPCs, and deployment teams plan and win EV charging projects. Along the way, we kept hearing about the same pain: "Get us through permitting faster so we can get equipment in the ground." So Kelson Reiss and I decided to follow that lead. With Daniel Ihlenfeldt, PE and Tyler Blauvelt, P.E. leading as Principal PEs, Monterra now delivers engineering services and permit-ready plan sets for electrical projects, from EV charging and BESS to commercial tenant improvements and power distribution for edge data centers. And we're reimagining the engineering firm from the ground up: our PEs lead and direct the work of AI engineering assistants we've developed in-house. The result is engineering delivered at AI speed, and PEs who can focus on applying their expertise and judgment instead of the busywork. There's enormous demand for AI, electrification, and more power today. Meeting it takes all hands on deck and more productivity across the entire project lifecycle, from planning to design to construction. And we're thrilled to play our part: designing systems with the rigor and care they deserve, at a speed that matches the ambition of the teams deploying them. Since launching the practice, we've been helping clients like DMH Electric Inc. and EVolved EV Charging Solutions engineer their projects faster, either as their engineering partner or as an extension of their in-house team. If you have projects or a deployment portfolio that can't afford weeks or months of delays in engineering and plan check, let's talk.
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisImagine you are Burger King, H&M or BMW (all Jeeves customers) with teams in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, USA and Europe, all using different AI tools. How do you manage corporate AI spend across countries, currencies and entities? 🌍🤖 Introducing Jeeves Global AI Spend Tracker across 30 countries and currencies 🥁 Engineering pays OpenAI in dollars. Product pays Anthropic in euros. Support is adding Claude Enterprise seats. Local teams are testing new providers in pesos. Every provider has its own dashboard, invoice and definition of a token. Finance sees card charges 30 days later, scattered across entities and currencies. Nobody can answer the simple questions: what are we spending on AI, which teams and countries are driving it, what will we spend by month end? And it keeps getting harder. One month Anthropic has the best model, the next it is OpenAI, then someone else. Every serious company will run multiple models, multiple providers, plus seats for Cursor, ChatGPT Enterprise and more. So we built a global AI Spend tracker inside Jeeves 🦁 Connect your providers and see every dollar of your AI spend across the globe in one place. By provider, model, API key, employee, team, entity, country and currency. Track your daily run rate, see what is driving it, project where you finish the month and get a pulse on ROI. Connections are read only and Jeeves never sees your prompts or company data 🔒 AI is becoming one of the largest lines in your budget. Now you can manage it globally with the same visibility and controls you apply to payroll and cloud spend. We are opening early access to a small group of global enterprises! 🌍 DM me and we will help you find those 24 Cursor seats nobody remembers buying 👀📩
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisYesterday a friend of ours brought his 6 year old daughter in the office, introduced her to Dawn Dobras and I, and told her "This is what Investors look like". Thrilled to be part of the 5.7% of VC funds started by women. Thank you Amie Sheridan for sharing out story. Thank you Antonio Key for being a great friend to us.
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Clara Brenner liked thisClara Brenner liked thisNew wall decal installed at Hippo Campus, the San Francisco office for Hustle Fund!
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
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LEED AP
US Green Building Council
Volunteer Experience
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Bay Area Local Advisory Committee Member
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC)
- 5 years 5 months
Publications
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These Five Fundraising Mistakes Can Kill Your Startup’s Seed Round
Fast Company
See publicationFundraising is hard, and it can take a long time–especially right now. So do yourself a favor and leave plenty of time and runway to get it done. And avoid those dumb deal-breakers.
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The One Email Every Founder Should Know How to Write to Investors
Fast Company
See publicationYou have to keep your investors in the loop, even when you aren't fundraising. Here's how.
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Seeding Mission-Driven Startups
Stanford Social Innovation Review
A look at the current early-stage investment landscape for social startups, and how entrepreneurs can make a better case for funding.
Other authorsSee publication -
Startups Can’t Afford to Ignore Government
TechCrunch
Government is now more critical to the success or failure of startups than ever before. Many of today’s largest and most successful private startups are playing in a public space that is highly politicized, highly regulated, or traditionally run by government.
Other authorsSee publication
Honors & Awards
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"30 Under 30" for Social Entrepreneurship
Forbes
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Female Founder to Watch
Women 2.0
Other similar profiles
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Forsan Hussein
Forsan Hussein
High-Impact International Business Executive and Turnaround Specialist.<br>Venture Investor with Demonstrated Skill in Driving Profits.<br>Exceptional Cross-Cultural Communicator. Proven Track Record in Strategy, Fundraising, Emerging<br>Growth Markets and Innovation. Extensive Global Network (US, Europe, Mideast, China).<br>US-Educated with Harvard MBA. Dual US-Israel Citizenship. Fluency in Arabic, English, Hebrew.
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Harvrinder Athwal
Can fundraising teams detect a stalled process before silence becomes the strategy? The forwardable lesson is that long sales cycles need an early-warning layer, not simply more activity at the top of the funnel. The system is designed to recommend action, not merely record that progress slowed. The Long Cycle RAISE combines mandate scoring, allocation signals, trigger detection and pipeline intelligence to surface issues earlier. The Warning Layer The workflow can track investor stage, relationship activity, soft commitments, hard commitments and risks around the target process. The Waiting Problem The company is addressing a process that managers already understand and repeatedly need to solve. RAISE is raising capital and looking for investors. See company website https://raiseplatform.eu and then DM me for more info. Is faster feedback more valuable than faster outreach in institutional fundraising?
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Jonathan Greechan
Proud to support Esusu as it enters its next phase of growth with a new $50M Series C fundraise! Wemimo Abbey, Samir Goel and team continue to lead the industry in credit building and economic mobility for millions of renters nationwide. Esusu (Founder Institute San Francisco portfolio company) is setting a new standard for combining economic and societal impact. By helping renters get credit (literally) for paying their rent on time, they are increasing financial access and empowering more people to become homeowners - in fact, they have already empowered over $30BN in new mortgages from renters across their system. I'm especially excited about how they plan to leverage their massive dataset to create even more impact. By making rental payment data a more prominent feature in mortgage underwriting, Esusu will be able to increase the number of people that can buy homes and build generational wealth. This is a truly inspiring company 🙌 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/guUKsGtY
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