Carolina Huaranca Mendoza

Carolina is a proud Peruvian-American with indigenous roots. Her last name, Huaranca, is Quechua, the official language of the Incas. She is also a graduate of Cornell University and a recipient of the Konolige Merit MBA Fellowship at The Wharton School.

Carolina Huaranca Mendoza is a Co-founder & General Partner at First Close Partners (FCP). FCP invests in venture funds owned and operated by underrepresented fund managers across the globe with the goal of making the venture capital industry more equitable. She began her venture investing career as a Principal at Kapor Capital, a fund which invested in companies such as Uber, Twilio, Promise, and CareerKarma. While at Kapor she also set the first formal investing strategy into diverse emerging managers. Upon graduating Cornell University, she worked as an investment banker in M&A. But, her passion for tech entrepreneurship led to a Sales & Marketing Manager role at SchoolNet which sold to Pearson for $230.0M. She would go on to launch her own startup, Spriggle, a marketplace for education products. Carolina channeled her passion for STEM to serve as the Founding Director of the Clubs Division of Girls Who Code launching programs to teach over 2,000 girls computer science.