Cindy Padnos

Cindy Padnos is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures, a seed and early stage VC firm investing exclusively in Enterprise/B2B software startups. With three funds under management, Cindy has lead more than 25 investments in market innovators in SaaS business applications, cloud infrastructure and data center operations.

Notable portfolio exits include Xactly (IPO NYSE: XTLY then acquired by Vista Equity), Opsmatic (acquired by New Relic), Sim Ops Studios (acquired by Autodesk) and Sense Platform (acquired by Cloudera).

As a prior entrepreneur, Cindy was founder/CEO of SaaS startup Vivant (now part of Oracle), CEO of Acumen and VP marketing at Scopus (IPO then acquired by Siebel). She has been recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech (Fast Company), Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley (New York Times) and dubbed ”Queen B2B” (VentureBeat).

Cindy is an advisory board member for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of several research papers regarding diversity in high tech. As a graduate of the University of Michigan and CMU, Cindy has had the honor of offering commencement addresses at both universities.

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