Investor / VCSilicon Valley / Bay Area

Cake Ventures

Investor / VC · San Francisco, CA

San Francisco CA. Seed-stage VC firm founded by Monique Woodard. Thesis: technology shaped by major demographic changes — aging/longevity, increased spending power of women, majority-minority shift. Portfolio: Blavity, Silvernest, Guaranteed, Pamper, Rares. Previously: Venture Partner 500 Startups (US + sub-Saharan Africa), Venture Scout Lightspeed. SF Mayor's Innovation Fellow. Founded Black Founders (10K+ members). BA Political Science University of Miami. Kauffman Fellow Class 26.

Founded

2021

Region

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Investors

People

Monique Woodard

About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 197

VC / investors 63

Companies 117

Schools 17

Known For

Software

Semiconductors