Mala Ramakrishnan

Managing Partner, Progressive Ventures | President, Founders Creative 501(c)(3)

📍 United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 48 investments📅 7 years investing🗓 Last invested Apr 2026
VC🌍 United States20+ investmentsInvested this year
48
Total investments
19
Early stage
5
Mid stage
2
Late stage
7y
Years active

Portfolio

48 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
Apr 2026
Building the next generation of AI-native real estate investing. Smart Bricks is an applied AI lab building frontier reasoning systems for real estate investing. We deploy advanced AI directly into underwriting, sourcing, diligence, and portfolio workflows, compressing months of analysis into minutes. Global rollout underway. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Speedrun), Techstars, 500 Global, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Harvard Business School, with strategic angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. We operate across the UK, the US, and the UAE. Global rollout underway. Named by TechCrunch as one of the Top 200 startups globally.
Investor
Apr 2026
At BrandPal, we’re building the world’s first agentic operating system for social commerce—an end-to-end AI platform that helps global brands plan, execute, and scale social commerce, all in one place. Our mission is simple: to democratize professional social commerce capabilities for every brand and seller—and to power the work of entire social commerce teams, from strategy and creators to content and optimization. Since founding BrandPal, we’ve driven over 1.2 billion impressions, generated $350 million in GMV, and helped clients achieve 10× annual revenue growth. We’re trusted by public companies and premium brands, and we’re the official Learning Partner of TikTok Shop Academy, where we’ve educated more than 7.5 million global sellers. Our team brings deep expertise from TikTok, Amazon, Google, and Snapchat. We’ve been featured by Fortune, Forbes, and CNBC, and are backed and supported by Plug and Play Tech Center, Honeystone Ventures, and StartX. We believe social commerce will redefine global e-commerce—and BrandPal is building the AI infrastructure to power that future.
Investor
Mar 2026
Constellation Space is building the critical software infrastructure required to scale the next generation of satellite networks. Our flagship platform, ConstellationOS, leverages real-time telemetry, federated learning, and physics-informed AI models to predict satellite link failures before they happen, enabling autonomous rerouting and preventing data loss.
Investor
Mar 2026
Autonomous AI agents that answer calls, close sales, and run operations, so your team can focus on guests. Trusted by some of the top hotel groups in the US, supporting 50+ hotels across brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt
Investor
Dec 2025
Companies waste billions on bad ads, mismatched landing pages, and poor budget allocation. Uplane fixes this by replacing a patchwork of agencies, spreadsheets, and siloed tools with one self-improving system. It creates ads, builds matching landing pages, allocates budgets across different channels and more, all in real time.
Investor
Dec 2025
Re-imagining the marketing function in an AI-native era, automate your content marketing Y Combinator, Pelion Venture, Blast Club, Transpose Platform, Progressive Venture, Wefunder (Capitalized Fund), Mindworks Capital, and more
Investor
Dec 2025
We are building the best AI Voice Agents to handle tedious insurance calls for healthcare billing teams ✅ Claim Status Inquires ✅ A/R recovery ✅ Appeal Follow-up
Investor
Dec 2025
Leadbay qualifies millions of Data-Signal-Scarce leads that couldnt be found before. Teams at LOréal, Saint-Gobain, Gerflor USA, Corgi, and Nespresso B2B have 3xd their addressable market and 10xd what they defined as "qualified leads." Talking to our customers, we used to hear, "10 minutes on Leadbay beats 6 months with Clay and a GTM agency." Co-founders are Milan Stankovic (CTO) - PhD to make AI work with limited data, and Ludovic Granger (CEO). Y Combinator backed company - YC F25 batch. Create an account. A new market is yours. https://leadbay.ai/
Investor
Dec 2025
1.5 Billion people try and learn languages every year. Most fail. Theres a better way. Parrot is the #1 to acquire languages, connect with people while break down language barriers.
early stageEducation
Investor
Oct 2025
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first — ahead of profit. To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. Our investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership. At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Investor
Sep 2025
We’re a Southeast Asia–based AI-driven B2B marketplace and integrated sourcing platform that lets small businesses handle procurement, fulfillment, and logistics through one intuitive interface. Built on a decentralized delivery network and an AI intelligence engine that continuously ingests global commodity trends, regional transit data, and your own sales patterns, our platform forecasts demand ahead of time, spots cost fluctuations before they pinch your margins, and reroutes shipments around potential delays. Trusted by more than 1,200 distributors and retailers, we’re democratizing the enterprise-grade insights that help companies eliminate stock-outs, protect profits, and scale with confidence.
Investor
Sep 2025
Humoniq is building the first full-stack AI BPO for the travel & transport industries, which outsource $20B of customer support each year. Our AI-native approach improves speed, accuracy, and satisfaction.
Investor
Sep 2025
Monarcha is an AI-powered geospatial platform that turns natural language into spatial analysis, styling, and workflows with no GIS expertise required. It connects to your data, understands context, and can runs 50+ spatial tools instantly on the map.
Investor
Sep 2025
We help largest enterprises in the US adopt, deploy and maintain fleets of robots. Our mission is to upskill the front line workforce to become robot operators and build the ecosystem to enable robotic companies to thrive in the US. Our company has 3 specialities: 1. Finanicing. With over $500M in capital to finance hardware companies at 5% discount rates, we are lower cost than any other bank or firm. RaaS is broken, and we can help fix it by unlocking revenue sooner (non-debt, non-dilutive) 2. Servicing. Robots will breakdown - no question about it. How does one get their bot fixed ASAP? We have a network of 2,600+ robot technicians in 161 cities in the US to fix any robot, any where, any time 3. Solution provider For our direct customers, the large hospitality & medical systems, the large BSCs nationwide and university systems, we are the go-to partner to help adopt, deploy and maintain your fleets of robots. We guarantee ROI, warranties, support, data security measures and best-in-class bots for their specific tasks from across OEMs. The largest industries trust Cardinal to manage stresss-free their robotic assets so its not their head ache.
Investor
Sep 2025
AI-agents that find you customers who already want to buy
Show all 48 investments ↓
Experience · 53 entries
All (53)
Investments (48)
Founder (5)
2026
Investor
Apr 2026
Building the next generation of AI-native real estate investing. Smart Bricks is an applied AI lab building frontier reasoning systems for real estate investing. We deploy advanced AI directly into underwriting, sourcing, diligence, and portfolio workflows, compressing months of analysis into minutes. Global rollout underway. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Speedrun), Techstars, 500 Global, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Harvard Business School, with strategic angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. We operate across the UK, the US, and the UAE. Global rollout underway. Named by TechCrunch as one of the Top 200 startups globally.
Investor
Apr 2026
At BrandPal, we’re building the world’s first agentic operating system for social commerce—an end-to-end AI platform that helps global brands plan, execute, and scale social commerce, all in one place. Our mission is simple: to democratize professional social commerce capabilities for every brand and seller—and to power the work of entire social commerce teams, from strategy and creators to content and optimization. Since founding BrandPal, we’ve driven over 1.2 billion impressions, generated $350 million in GMV, and helped clients achieve 10× annual revenue growth. We’re trusted by public companies and premium brands, and we’re the official Learning Partner of TikTok Shop Academy, where we’ve educated more than 7.5 million global sellers. Our team brings deep expertise from TikTok, Amazon, Google, and Snapchat. We’ve been featured by Fortune, Forbes, and CNBC, and are backed and supported by Plug and Play Tech Center, Honeystone Ventures, and StartX. We believe social commerce will redefine global e-commerce—and BrandPal is building the AI infrastructure to power that future.
Investor
Mar 2026
Constellation Space is building the critical software infrastructure required to scale the next generation of satellite networks. Our flagship platform, ConstellationOS, leverages real-time telemetry, federated learning, and physics-informed AI models to predict satellite link failures before they happen, enabling autonomous rerouting and preventing data loss.
Investor
Mar 2026
Autonomous AI agents that answer calls, close sales, and run operations, so your team can focus on guests. Trusted by some of the top hotel groups in the US, supporting 50+ hotels across brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt
2025
Investor
Dec 2025
Companies waste billions on bad ads, mismatched landing pages, and poor budget allocation. Uplane fixes this by replacing a patchwork of agencies, spreadsheets, and siloed tools with one self-improving system. It creates ads, builds matching landing pages, allocates budgets across different channels and more, all in real time.
Show all 53 entries ↓
Investment activity
2019–2026 · 48 investments
2019120221202322024920253120264
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