Samara Hernandez

Samara is actively involved in the Chicago tech community and passionate about helping underrepresented groups get into STEM education, venture capital, and entrepreneurship. She co-founded the Latinx Founders Collective organization to bring together Latinx founders, investors, and community leaders to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem. She is actively involved in LatinxVCs, a group designed to grow and support the Latinx venture capital ecosystem. Samara is also an advisor to Angeles, a Chicago-based angel group investing in Latinx founders, Chicago Blend, a group focusing on diversifying the Chicago startup and venture capital ecosystem, and Camino Financial, a company providing affordable loans to Latinx small businesses.

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Samara earned an Industrial and Operations Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago with her husband, also a startup CEO, and her energetic son.

Samara is Founding Partner of an institutionally-backed pre-seed stage fund, Chingona Ventures, which focuses on investing in technology and technology-enabled companies all over the U.S. Prior to this she was an investor at MATH Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund investing in technology start-ups with differentiated approaches to customer acquisition. In this capacity, she led new investment review, diligence, and execution.

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Prior to venture capital, Samara worked at Goldman Sachs, where she was continually ranked top 5 in selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting on business practices. She started her career in the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity (FICC) group where she led multiple technology enhancing projects across global exchanges.

As a member of Class 26, Samara is serving her fellowship at Chingona Ventures under the mentorship of Trey Hart of Kauffman Fellows Class 20.