Alisa Yaffa

StepUp Funding
Alisa Yaffa
Alisa Yaffa, is an active investor, and the founder and managing director of Step Up Funding, LLC., a technology investment and advisory service firm. Alisa leads the firm’s private-company technology investment and business advisory practices. 

Alisa has been an active investor in early and late-stage private companies for 10+ years. Her experience as co-founder and chairperson from 1994-2008 of Synplicity (an electronic design automation software company) provides her with valuable insights in choosing investments and advising technology companies. Alisa is also on the board of X-Mode Social, Inc., a big data business intelligence company headquartered in Virginia.

During the 14 years at Synplicity, Alisa held at various times most of the executive operational roles, negotiated 4 rounds of funding, was involved with the IPO in 2000, various acquisitions and due-diligence projects, and the final sale to Synopsys in 2008. As chairperson of the board, she got to see it all. She especially enjoyed the legal, financial, and corporate governance work.

Lev Mass is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at XSeed Capital, bringing extensive expertise in cloud computing, mobile, and business development.

Prior to joining XSeed, Lev ran operations and business development for the Cloud Group at Yahoo!. While at Yahoo!, Lev helped to facilitate the spin-off of the Hadoop Group into what is now Hortonworks, a leading big data company. In addition, he held a number of executive roles at Yahoo! helping to define strategy for mobile, social, cloud and big data. Previous to Yahoo!, Lev was an investment banker with Thomas Weisel Partners focused on TMT (technology, media, telecommunications) and health technology.


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