Cindy Padnos

Founder & Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures

📍 San Francisco Bay Area, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 30 investments📅 20 years investing🗓 Last invested Jan 2025𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 United States20+ investments
30
Total investments
14
Early stage
9
Mid stage
2
Late stage
20y
Years active

Portfolio

28 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
2025
At Labra, our mission is to make businesses successful in everything about the Cloud. Our suite of SaaS solutions caters to a wide variety of use cases including, but not limited to infrastructure, security, compliance, sales, operation, and marketplaces.
Investor
2025
Our AI Agents are purpose-built to solve your organization’s business problems, driving efficiency, accuracy, and growth across your business. Intelo is more than a technology provider; were your partner in transformation. From Buy Planning to Allocation and Replenishment, Intelo automates critical workflows, enabling retailers to meet demand accurately, reduce excess inventory, and improve sell-through. By streamlining complex data challenges, our AI agents empower teams to make smarter, faster decisions that drive profitability and operational efficiency.
Investor
2025
🚀 IP Author: The Only Gen AI Patent Solution with an Integrated Patent Database 🚀 Patent attorneys, the future is here—and it’s fully integrated. IP Author is the only generative AI-powered SaaS solution designed specifically for patent professionals, seamlessly combining AI-driven drafting, office action response, and a fully integrated patent database. 🔍 Why It Matters Most Gen AI tools stop at drafting—IP Author goes further. With built-in access to prior art and global patent data, you draft with real-time insights, ensuring stronger, more defensible patents from the start. 💡 From Invention to Commercialization Support every phase of the patent lifecycle—prior art search, claim refinement, office action responses, and patent commercialization—in one platform. ⚡ Stay Ahead or Get Left Behind IP Author is redefining patent practice. Patent leaders at top corporations and law firms are already leveraging our technology—don’t be the last to adopt it. 👉 See the Future in Action The patent world is evolving fast. Experience the only Gen AI solution with an integrated patent database and stay ahead of the competition. 📅 Book a Demo Today #PatentAI #GenAIforPatents #IntellectualProperty #LegalTech #Innovation #PriorArtSearch #PatentAttorney #IPAuthor #FutureofPatents
Investor
2025
Our platform enables Inspection companies of all sizes to dramatically improve operational efficiency and unlock the power of their underlying data. With an industry-trained, applied AI foundation, our API-based software revolutionizes the economics of residential, commercial, construction, and insurance inspections.
Investor
Dec 2024
At Brevity, our motto is "The game is won before it starts". Accelerate new hire ramp-up and increase quota attainment with AI-Powered Role Play. 1) Build your sales playbook, conversation frameworks, and prospect personas in minutes with AI. 2) Invite team members, assign live practice scenarios with AI prospects, and track progress. 3) Streamline training and development with AI-powered scoring and feedback. Request a DEMO today at www.brevitypitch.com
Investor
Aug 2024
At Provarity.AI, we believe in the unlimited growth potential of a streamlined, data-driven presales strategy. Our AI-powered platform equips your SEs – the pit crew of your sales engine – with the tools they need to drive efficiency, shorten sales cycles, and secure more wins. Join us on this high-performance journey to reshape the future of presales. Buckle up, and get ready to cross the finish line with Provarity.AI! Stay tuned for more updates and connect with us to learn how we can power up your sales operations. #PresalesRevolution #ProvarityAI #SalesPerformance #AI #Innovation
Investor & Board Member
2022
Centralize feedback from multiple sources and count with AI to sift noise from signals, discover users needs, and gather evidence to make more data-informed decisions.
Investor
2022
TAZI is an Adaptive Machine Learning platform serving business users. TAZI has been chosen as a Cool Vendor in Core AI Technologies by Gartner and is cited as a Responsible, Explainable AI vendor in various analyst reports. Also, Data Science Central considered TAZI as "The Next Generation of Auto ML”. TAZI platform is based on an architecture combining 30+ years of experience and 23 patents in AI. TAZI enables business experts (and data scientists) to easily create, update, deploy and take actions with ML. TAZI models are understandable and learn continuously from streaming data and humans. TAZI helps insurance, retail, pharma, health, finance, manufacturing, and telco industries in making smarter business decisions via democratizing AI. TAZI provides various solutions such as customer retention, churn prediction, sales forecasting, and demand prediction to many companies including Fortune 500 from its offices in San Francisco and Istanbul. We enable human and machine intelligence to work together!
Investor
2019
JetStream Software provides a unique and patented Continuous Data Protection technology which reduces the cost and complexity of cloud-based Disaster Recovery.
Investor
Dec 2018
Pyze is the leading Digital Transformation analytics platform to maximize process efficiency and application productivity through low-code process mining and usage analytics. Pyze auto-discovers complex end-to-end business process flows to surface process bottlenecks, activity hotspots, and user experience optimization opportunities. Pyze enables continuous improvement across multi-screen product journeys by providing a data-driven approach to maximize ROI and Business impact, regardless of the underlying technologies. Pyze has been recognized by leading technology research firms (Gartner and Forrester) and press as the leader in Cross-Platform Behavioral Analytics, Marketing and Process Intelligence Solutions.
Investor & Board Member
2018
Arkestro’s Predictive Procurement platform accelerates enterprise spend transformation, using AI and game theory to unlock trapped savings and reduce risk, enabling teams to influence significantly more spend. Learn more at https://www.arkestro.com
Investor
2018
Contentstack is the creator of the headless CMS and is the Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) category leader. Iconic brands around the world, such as Alaska Airlines, ASICS, Burberry, Mattel, Mitsubishi and Walmart, invest in Contentstack to rise above the noise in todays crowded and competitive digital markets and to gain their unique Experience Edge. Contentstack and its employees are dedicated to the customers and communities they serve. The company is recognized for its unmatched customer care and tradition of giving back globally through the Contentstack Cares program, including proud support of Pledge 1% and Girls Who Code. Learn more at www.contentstack.com.
Investor
Feb 2017
Financial technology enabling investment management teams to customize and scale multi-asset portfolio design. Aggregate your intelligence to analyze asset allocation and portfolio risk and return, then instantly amplify your story on one cloud platform.
Investor and Board Member
2017
Pex is a digital rights technology company, enabling the fair and transparent use of copyright online. With Pex’s advanced identification technology customers can simplify licensing, brand safety, and compliance at the speed and scale of the Internet. Our licensing infrastructure allows platforms to manage and license content before it’s published, empowering creators to upload freely while respecting copyright. In return, rightsholders are able to monitor and capitalize on the content they own. Pex also provides trust and safety tools for platforms and law enforcement to help prevent the spread of toxic content. For more information, reach out at sales@pex.com.
Investor
2015
Bedrocks software takes syndicated & retail data (Nielsen, IRI, Spins, Whole Foods, etc) and transforms it into dynamic selling stories for consumer product goods (CPG) sales managers. The software gives sales & marketing managers easy to apply data-based selling stories that are fine tuned to do three things - sell more products in to retail, keep customers​ products in retail and find ways to optimize their categories. Bedrock’s next generation software platform utilizes machine learning to make faster and smarter recommendations for our customers. We have a broad set of customers ranging from small natural foods companies to multi-national conglomerates. Bedrock Analytics is a venture-backed high-growth technology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Contact us to schedule a demo.
Show all 28 investments ↓
Experience · 35 entries
All (35)
Investments (30)
Founder (2)
Board (10)
2025
Investor
2025
At Labra, our mission is to make businesses successful in everything about the Cloud. Our suite of SaaS solutions caters to a wide variety of use cases including, but not limited to infrastructure, security, compliance, sales, operation, and marketplaces.
Investor
2025
Our AI Agents are purpose-built to solve your organization’s business problems, driving efficiency, accuracy, and growth across your business. Intelo is more than a technology provider; were your partner in transformation. From Buy Planning to Allocation and Replenishment, Intelo automates critical workflows, enabling retailers to meet demand accurately, reduce excess inventory, and improve sell-through. By streamlining complex data challenges, our AI agents empower teams to make smarter, faster decisions that drive profitability and operational efficiency.
Investor
2025
🚀 IP Author: The Only Gen AI Patent Solution with an Integrated Patent Database 🚀 Patent attorneys, the future is here—and it’s fully integrated. IP Author is the only generative AI-powered SaaS solution designed specifically for patent professionals, seamlessly combining AI-driven drafting, office action response, and a fully integrated patent database. 🔍 Why It Matters Most Gen AI tools stop at drafting—IP Author goes further. With built-in access to prior art and global patent data, you draft with real-time insights, ensuring stronger, more defensible patents from the start. 💡 From Invention to Commercialization Support every phase of the patent lifecycle—prior art search, claim refinement, office action responses, and patent commercialization—in one platform. ⚡ Stay Ahead or Get Left Behind IP Author is redefining patent practice. Patent leaders at top corporations and law firms are already leveraging our technology—don’t be the last to adopt it. 👉 See the Future in Action The patent world is evolving fast. Experience the only Gen AI solution with an integrated patent database and stay ahead of the competition. 📅 Book a Demo Today #PatentAI #GenAIforPatents #IntellectualProperty #LegalTech #Innovation #PriorArtSearch #PatentAttorney #IPAuthor #FutureofPatents
Investor
2025
Our platform enables Inspection companies of all sizes to dramatically improve operational efficiency and unlock the power of their underlying data. With an industry-trained, applied AI foundation, our API-based software revolutionizes the economics of residential, commercial, construction, and insurance inspections.
2024
Investor
Dec 2024
At Brevity, our motto is "The game is won before it starts". Accelerate new hire ramp-up and increase quota attainment with AI-Powered Role Play. 1) Build your sales playbook, conversation frameworks, and prospect personas in minutes with AI. 2) Invite team members, assign live practice scenarios with AI prospects, and track progress. 3) Streamline training and development with AI-powered scoring and feedback. Request a DEMO today at www.brevitypitch.com
Show all 35 entries ↓
Investment activity
2006–2025 · 30 investments
20063200822009120123201312014520151201722018320191202222024220254
Recent (last 2 years)Earlier