30 Under 30 In Venture Capital 2021: Meet The Young Investors Spotting Tech’s Next Breakouts

Hailing from new funds, old firms and a game-changing diversity group, these standout investors represent venture capital’s next wave.

^Frederik Groce moved a lot growing up, living mostly in motels. A past felony conviction limited job opportunities for his father; his mother, originally from Belgium, worked as a housekeeper. Now, fostering opportunity is deeply personal for the young venture capitalist. “Tech is where new wealth is being created,” he says. “And if we’re the gatekeepers, we should be try-ing to make it more inclusive.”

On top of his day job as a principal at $1 billion-in-assets Storm Ventures, in 2018 Groce and cofounder Sydney Sykes launched BLCK VC, a San Francisco-based nonprofit with a mission to double the number of Black investors employed by VC firms to 4% by 2024.

Groce and Sykes are just two of four members of BLCK VC to appear on the Forbes Venture Capital 30 Under 30 List for 2021, which recognizes up-and-coming investors who’ve shown leadership in the tech community, from writing bold checks to promising startups to launching their own funds and shattering their industry’s ceilings along the way.

They include Armaan Ali and Baris Akis, two immigrants who raised $250 million for their own venture firm Human Capital, carving out stakes in high-flying companies like Anduril, Brex and Snowflake, and Soona Amhaz, whose family’s struggles with currency fluctuations in her native Lebanon helped inspire her to launch crypto-focused firm Volt Capital in 2019.

At Ingressive Capital, Nigerian-American Maya Horgan Famodu has invested in 30-plus startups across the African continent, seeding some of its fastest-growing businesses, including Paystack, which sold for over $200 million to Stripe.

And at Original Capital, Sumeet Gajri dipped into his life savings, borrowed hundreds of thousands from online lenders and maxed out his credit cards to launch his own firm from a working class Scottish background, eventually returning more than 4x in gross returns from $17 million invested over three and a half years and seeing a better than 4x gross return on capital, Gajri’s upscaled, closing $25 million for his new fund that started investing in September 2020.

A new guard at some of venture capital’s institutions breaks onto this year’s list, too, from Mary D’Onofrio a growth-stage dealmaker at Bessemer Venture Partners, too Terri Burns, the youngest deal partner in history at Alphabet’s venture firm, GV. Whether they work at a big firm or small, new or old, the investors on the Under 30 list share a passion for improving their industry, making a positive difference for a new generation of startup founders they support, and an eye for spotting tech’s next big thing.

This year’s 30 Under 30 list was edited by senior editors Alex Konrad and Maneet Ahuja. Our judges were Tony Florence, general partner at NEA; Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures; Jess Lee, partner at Sequoia; and Alice Lloyd George, founding partner at Rogue and an alumna of the Under 30 list for 2016.

See the full Venture Capital list here.