Cindy Padnos

Founder of Illuminate Ventures
Cindy Padnos is an innovator, a glass-breaker and an advocate for all things entrepreneurial. She is a founder (both of a VC-backed tech startup and a VC firm), with a passion for enabling experimentation that can lead to discovery of new business models and unique points of leverage. Cindy bleeds B2B/Enterprise Tech – gaining the moniker “Queen B2B” and a place at the table with the top institutional investors in the category.

Cindy has been working with enterprise technology startups for more than 20 years - as a founder, operating executive, adviser or investor. She founded Illuminate Ventures, a seed and early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in enterprise cloud and mobile software companies. Illuminate seeks entrepreneurs that are "re-inventing the enterprise" with products that deliver dramatic productivity and decision making improvements while leveraging better, faster, cheaper - cloud technologies and innovative business models.

Previously, Cindy was at Outlook Ventures leading investments from the firm's $140M early-stage tech fund. She focused exclusively on enterprise cloud and mobile solutions, with two of the companies having gained IPOs. 

Prior to her investing career, Cindy led several successful venture-backed entrepreneurial efforts. She was founder/CEO of Vivant (now part of Oracle) an early Software as a Service (SaaS) company. She was CEO of Acumen, orchestrating a profitable M&A, and VP Marketing for Scopus, helping position this early CRM company for its successful IPO. Early in her career, Cindy served as a management consultant at Booz Allen and Arthur D Little. 

Illuminate is particularly interested in companies delivering:
- B2B SaaS applications and infrastructure
- Application of AI and blockchain technologies to the Enterprise
- Enterprise mobile solutions
- Predictive and prescriptive analytics that improve business results
- Business model innovation enablers
- Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

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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