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Hey, fintech fam 💜

I hope you’re having an incredible summer. And that wherever you are, it isn’t too hot 🥵

NYC is under another tornado warning. If you’re in the city, stay safe! I’ll be hanging out inside today.

Today, I’m excited to introduce you to my friend Sophia Zhao from Alumni Ventures.

She told me an incredible story about investing in a once-in-a-lifetime company that came from a casual catch-up call with another woman who gave her the details.

"When you share that you want to back more women leaders, people bring you those deals," she said. "[This opportunity] came to me because I said it out loud."

You’ll love today’s story, so let's get into it. ✨

P.S. The Fintech is Femme fam can now join Alumni Ventures’ blockchain syndicate! Pick the deals you want it on, skip the ones you don’t.

There's a line Sophia Zhao said toward the end of our conversation that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

"AI gives agents capability," she told me. "But blockchain gives them accountability."

It captures something the financial services industry has been circling around all year.

Every serious operator I've spoken with in 2026 is wrestling with the same question:

How do we make AI agents trustworthy enough to act autonomously inside regulated, high-stakes financial systems?

How do we let an agent transact, sign, and delegate on behalf of a client — and have every counterparty, regulator, and auditor trust that it happened correctly?

The answer, Zhao argues, isn't just better AI.

It's the infrastructure layer underneath it. The immutable audit trail. The programmable permission layer.

The verifiable identity system that confirms an agent is authorized to act. 

That infrastructure already exists. It's called blockchain.

And the financial services industry has been so focused on the AI race that it hasn't fully reckoned with the fact that the two technologies don't actually compete.

Instead, they complete each other.

AI without blockchain accountability is capability without governance. Blockchain without AI is infrastructure without an interface.

Together, they're the foundation the next generation of financial services is actually being built on.

Zhao has been at this intersection longer than almost anyone in venture capital.

She's a Partner at Alumni Ventures, where she oversees both the Blockchain Fund and the Women's Fund — two mandates that, in her hands, turn out to be less separate than they seem. 

The Women's Fund is Alumni Ventures' dedicated vehicle for backing women-led companies at the frontier of technology — an explicit bet that the most underinvested category in venture capital is also among the most overlooked sources of outsized returns. 

The Blockchain Fund backs the decentralized infrastructure companies quietly generating real revenue while everyone else watches the AI headlines. 

Together, they're the same thesis expressed twice:

The best builders are being overlooked, and Sophia Zhao is one of the few people in venture capital positioned to find them.

She's been in crypto since 2018 — Galaxy Digital, Huobi US, Crypto.com — which means she lived through ICO mania, DeFi summer, the NFT cycle, the meltdowns, and the long quiet rebuild that followed.

She got into the space before it was consensus, before it was cool, and long before it was safe.

Zhao didn't plan to be in crypto.

At Yale's School of Management in 2017, she was assigned to cover blockchain for a research project. She'd put her hand up for AI and machine learning. She got blockchain instead — and resisted it at first.

But the more she learned, the more it reminded her of something she'd already seen play out. Not the early internet, as most people compared it to, but cloud computing.

"I thought blockchain would probably fade into the background and become just like infrastructure," she said.

"No one talks about Gmail being powered by cloud technology anymore. That's what I thought would happen with blockchain."

What she didn't anticipate was how long it would take for the noise to clear.

Each wave of the crypto hype cycle generated retail interest, and simultaneously buried the actual real-world use cases underneath layers of speculation and FOMO.

"A lot of good underlying insights were just under a mountain of speculation," she said.

"Back in 2021, token was a product. Now people are questioning — do you really need a token? It's more like an optional thing to consider."

She draws a direct parallel to the AI moment right now.

Back then, it was "we have a token for that." Today it's "we have an AI agent for that." The hype cycle is different. The dynamic is the same.

What's structurally different in 2026, she argues, is regulatory clarity — the GENIUS Act, the Clarity Act — which she describes not as policy wins but as permission structures.

With legal certainty comes a better class of builders. Founders who are asking about revenue, product market fit, and long-term durability rather than riding a wave to a quick exit.

"The noise has really faded," she said. "The signal is finally audible."

Zhao's investment thesis has a name: the boring is beautiful thesis. And the M&A data backs it up.

Infrastructure companies. Cross-border settlement players. Stablecoin card issuers.

Companies with licenses in multiple jurisdictions that would take a new entrant years and millions of dollars to replicate.

These are the companies getting acquired right now — quietly, with real revenue, by serious buyers.

Polygon Labs acquired Coinme, a crypto-as-a-service platform, and cross-chain infrastructure provider Sequence for over $250 million.

Mastercard acquired digital asset infrastructure startup BVNK for up to $1.8 billion to bridge traditional fiat and blockchain networks.

This M&A activity validates that the boring layer is exactly where the serious money is going.

"Companies that excite me are not the ones trying to reinvent money," Zhao said.

"They're the ones trying to make money move faster, cheaper, and for people who actually need that."

The remittance thesis — the idea that blockchain's most meaningful application is enabling cheaper, faster cross-border money movement for underserved populations — has been ripe for years.

It just had to wait for the market, the regulation, and the infrastructure to catch up, according to Zhao. 

Alumni Ventures has been deploying capital into that thesis through investments in cross-border rails in Latin America and African infrastructure.

The middle layer that sits between stablecoins and the actual movement of money across borders. Not the stablecoin itself — the pipes that make the stablecoin useful.

"The remittance opportunity is a lot bigger than remittances," she said. "It's basically any dollar that needs to touch a bank and takes three days and costs 3%."

Zhao also watches the tokenized real world assets space closely — Franklin Templeton and BlackRock are already testing it — but she's more interested in what she sees as the coming wave: tokenizing private credit, tokenizing fund interests.

Less about the headline, more about the underlying infrastructure that makes those transactions possible and auditable at scale.

The most instructive window into how Zhao operates — and how the Women's Fund and Blockchain Fund become one unified thesis in practice — came from a deal she almost didn't see.

She was on a routine catch-up call with an investor at another firm.

Zhao had recently joined the Women's Fund at Alumni Ventures and mentioned that she wanted to back more women-led companies.

Her contact said: “I'm looking at a consumer deal with a blockchain angle. The founders are both women. You should take a look.”

That deal was Bluesky.

One phone call. One woman investor telling another.

That's how some of the best deals in venture capital actually get sourced — not through formal pipelines or competitive processes, but through relationships built on shared conviction.

The Women's Fund isn't just a mandate. It's a sourcing advantage.

"Jay Graber — she's so charismatic," Zhao told me.

"There are people you meet, and you just want to learn more. It's a genuine pull."

But the pull alone doesn't close a term sheet. What closed it was the data.

When Graber walked Zhao through Bluesky's growth chart during their first Zoom call, Zhao and her Managing Partner reacted in unison.

"Wow."

Bluesky had grown from 30,000 users in April 2023 to over 10 million by September 2024.

Then, in the weeks following the U.S. election, it exploded past 24.7 million accounts. As of this writing, the platform has surpassed 45 million.

The underlying architecture mattered too.

Bluesky's AT Protocol is built for openness and interoperability — the inverse of how Meta, TikTok, and X operate.

Users own their social graphs. Developers can build on top of the protocol without permission. Leave the app, keep your community. On X or Threads, leaving means starting over.

Jay Graber, who was handpicked in 2021 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to lead Bluesky, built the platform from the ground up before recently transitioning into the role of Chief Innovation Officer.

Toni Schneider has since stepped in as CEO. Rose Wang, Bluesky's COO — a Harvard grad, Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and seasoned operator — has been there since the beginning.

Two women who built something from nothing. And a growth chart that told the story better than any pitch deck.

"When we come together and support each other, there is a difference," Zhao said.

"My VC friend flagged me for the Bluesky deal because I said out loud that I wanted to back more women leaders. We're just here to help each other win."

Alumni Ventures closed its investment in Bluesky's Series A in October 2024, co-investing alongside Blockchain Capital.

Four months later, they doubled down.

"We came back for the Series B," Zhao said. "Bain Capital led the round, and that was one of their largest [investments] ever written."

In April 2025, Bluesky disclosed raising $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from True Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation — a signal that the platform's momentum had caught the attention of some of the most discerning investors in technology.

I've been reporting on the agentic AI race in financial services all year.

From Fiserv's Co-President Dhivya Suryadevara rearchitecting bank infrastructure from first principles, to Salesforce's Eran Agrios building goal-based agents for wealth management advisors, to Chime's Janelle Sallenave automating 70% of customer support while NPS goes up.

The question every serious operator is wrestling with is the same:

How do we make AI agents trustworthy enough to act autonomously inside regulated, high-stakes financial systems?

Zhao's answer comes from a different direction than most.

"AI agents need to transact, sign, and delegate," she said.

"But I need to give them authorization — and I need the counterparty to know that this agent represents me and is authorized to do that."

Blockchain solves both sides of that problem.

It provides an immutable audit trail for every action an agent takes. It enables programmable permission layers that allow agents to execute autonomously within defined parameters.

And it creates verifiable identity infrastructure — so when an AI agent acts on your behalf, the counterparty can confirm the authorization is real.

That's the accountability layer. The capability layer — what AI agents can do — is advancing rapidly. 

But without accountability, capability is a liability inside regulated systems. Banks can't deploy agents they can't audit.

Advisors can't delegate to systems they can't verify. Consumers can't trust platforms that can't prove authorization happened.

She also points to a governance problem that most people aren't taking seriously enough yet. 

As AI-generated avatars, deepfakes, and synthetic media become more sophisticated, the question of verifiable authenticity becomes existential, especially in industries where identity and authorization carry legal and financial weight.

"I don't want an AI Sophia out there making statements," she said.

"We need a way to verify what model generated this, whether an image was tampered with. Blockchain gives us that verifiable layer."

And then there's the usability problem.

Even for crypto natives, managing wallets, seed phrases, and cross-chain complexity is genuinely off-putting.

AI agents could abstract all of that — becoming the interface layer that lets people benefit from decentralized finance without needing to understand the infrastructure underneath it.

AI gives agents capability. Blockchain gives them accountability.

Zhao may be one of the few people in venture capital who has sat inside blockchain infrastructure companies, watched the AI agent conversation unfold from a capital allocation seat, and connected the two threads into a single coherent thesis before the rest of the market caught up. 

Women still receive less than 2% of total venture funding. That number has barely moved in years.

Zhao doesn't spend much time on the statistic itself.

She spends her time on the thing that actually changes it — being in the rooms where deals surface, saying out loud what she's looking for, and building the kind of relationships where women investors share deals with each other, lift each other up, and bring their best opportunities to the table together.

"When you share that you want to back more women leaders, people bring you those deals," she said. "The Bluesky opportunity came to me because I said it out loud."

She points to builders getting far less attention than they deserve.

One that stopped her mid-conversation: Eve Bodnia, founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is building an energy-based reasoning model as an alternative to LLMs — targeting industries that require verifiable truth and security, like robotics design and chip design. 

Bodnia is a mathematician and physicist with a PhD in quantum information and 22 published academic papers on dark matter, quantum mechanics, and particle physics.

Yann LeCun — Turing Award winner and Founding Chair of Logical Intelligence's Technical Research Board — serves as a strategic advisor guiding their work on energy-based models and reasoning systems.

"[Bodnia is] a woman working on frontier tech who has the ability to attract world-class people to work with them," Zhao said. "That's a signal of her as a leader — before you can even look at the product."

It's the same signal she saw in Jay Graber. The same signal she looks for across every deal. Not the narrative. The data, the team, the trajectory.

Zhao’s own story carries the same through line.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants who built a business supplying building materials to the West Coast construction market, she grew up watching her father point to buildings he'd helped make possible — not the ones he'd built himself, but the ones he'd supplied.

"I'm going to look at all these companies," she said, "and be like, I helped fund and support this company that helped improve our lives in this way. That's what I really want."

I've spent a decade writing about the infrastructure layer of financial services.

The pipes, rails, and protocols that make money move.

Sophia Zhao is one of the few people I've spoken with this year who sees all of those layers simultaneously — blockchain as governance, AI as capability, women as the underinvested builders who will define what the next version of the financial system actually looks like.

The noise has faded. The signal is audible.

She's been listening — and investing — longer than most. That's worth paying attention to.

Alumni Ventures is a leading venture capital firm that democratizes startup investing for accredited individuals, managing over $1.3 billion in assets.

AV allows individuals to invest in institutional-grade portfolios with lower minimums, co-investing alongside leading venture capital firms.

Through its Blockchain Fund and Women's Fund, Alumni Ventures backs the next generation of frontier technology companies — from decentralized infrastructure to AI-native platforms. To learn more or join a syndicate group, visit AV.VC to learn more and get involved.

Young Cardamom… aka New York City’s beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani canceling subscription fees for everyone 😆

This song is honestly a bop, LOL.

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Thanks for spending time with me today!

Don’t forget to check out the blockchain syndicate at Alumni Ventures. And pass this link along to your friends if you think they’d be interested!

Love,

Nicole 💜