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The Name Came to Her at 2:30 AM
Karen Sheffield woke up in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed.
She turned to her husband and told him she had it.
The name.
The thing she'd been searching for. The word that would carry the next decade of her career.
"Pachamama Ventures."
It means Mother Earth in Quechua, the ancient language of the Incas. For a climate fund run by a Peruvian woman, there wasn't a better name in the world. By the next morning, when she tried to rationalize it or talk herself out of it, the name had already locked itself in.
Now, as of June 2026, Pachamama Ventures Fund I closed fund I.
54 LPs on the cap table, a portfolio in motion, and a community built around a single, urgent thesis: climate change is the most important problem of our generation, and the capital markets are finally catching up to it.
This is how she got here.
Lima, Peru. A House Full of Businesses.
Karen grew up in Lima, the capital of Peru. She's quick to point out that people don't usually think of Latin America when they think of entrepreneurial hubs. They should.
"Lima is a place where one or two out of every five families have a business," she says. "People are local small business owners. My parents were no different."
Her dad was an agronomist. Her mom was a medical doctor. Both had full-time careers. And on top of that, they always owned a business on the side.
It wasn't one business. It was a rotating roster of multiple businesses.
A pharmacy. A bakery. A small bus line that ran routes through Lima. A video rental store back when VHS tapes were how the world watched movies. Karen and her brothers were always part of it. Helping at the counter. Working part-time when school let out. Doing homework at the back of whatever business her parents were running that year.
To her, this was normal.
"It was a survival thing," she says. "You have a business because you have to make ends meet. Here in the US, entrepreneurship is more of a luxury. People say, 'I'd love to start a unicorn.' The reasons are different, but the chip on the shoulder is the same."
That chip on the shoulder shows up in every founder Karen now backs.
The Middle School Accessory Rental Business
Before there was Pachamama, before there was Fund I, before there was a finance executive career at Fortune 100 companies, there was a kid in middle school in Lima renting a Tetris hand-held game to her classmates for pocket money.
That was Karen at twelve.
Looking back, she remembers it like a normal thing. Sometimes she'd get her hands on interesting things that other kids would want. Charge a small fee. Run the numbers. Make some money. Do it again next week.
She'd been business-minded as far back as she can remember. She just didn't know yet that there was a name for it. Or that decades later, she'd be backing other people who saw the world the same way.
16 Years in the C-Suite. Then She Shifted Paths.
Karen came to the US for college, studied finance and economics, and met her future husband. He swears she told him, even back then, that one day she'd be the CEO of her own company. Karen doesn't remember saying it. But he insists.
Whatever she said or didn't say in college, her actual career started as far from the startup world as you can get.
She spent 16 years as a finance executive at some of the largest companies on Earth. American Airlines. PepsiCo. Visa. Fortune 100. Fortune 50. The kind of jobs that come with predictability, healthy comp, prestige, and a clear ladder.
For most people, that's the destination.
For Karen, it became the thing she had to leave.
She started angel investing on the side. Four years of writing personal checks, building a network, sharpening her thesis. And the more she did it, the more obvious the choice became.
"I realized I had a network that could support me through fundraising," she says. "I was always more interested in quality than quantity. I knew that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it on my own terms."
The other half of the decision was about maximizing impact.
"I could have stayed at Visa and probably had a big impact at that level. But given my background, my education, my network, and my urgency around climate change, I felt like I could do more over here. If someone else has been dreaming of being CFO of a public company since they were a kid, let me get out of the way. There's a need for what I can do over here."
She walked away from the corner office.
She walked toward Pachamama.
Why Climate. Why Now.
Karen has been calling climate change the biggest crisis of our generation for twenty years.
She's been early on this thesis for two decades. The rest of the world is finally arriving.
"Natural capital markets are finally maturing," she says. "BlackRock and other major institutional investors are putting real money into climate. There is real money to be made investing in this space. The world is catching up."
Pachamama Ventures Fund I is positioned exactly where that catch-up is happening. Early stage climate tech. Founders building the solutions to the most urgent problem of our generation. Capital flowing into climate at a pace that, twenty years ago, would have sounded like science fiction.
The thesis is straightforward. The conviction is unshakeable. The math is finally there.
The LPs Karen Calls Family
Karen describes her LPs, without hesitation, as her chosen family.
This wasn't a fund where she ran a checklist and accepted every wire that came in. Each LP is a relationship Karen built and curated, person by person, over two years. People she wants in the room. People who get the thesis. People who, when the fund needs help with a deal or a founder or a market read, will show up.
"They're chosen by me," she says. "It's a chosen family."
What this gives Pachamama is a moat that most Fund Is do not have. The LP base is not a passive pool of capital. It's a community that activates around the portfolio and around the mission.
That kind of LP base doesn't happen by accident. It happens because Karen spent the past two years treating fundraising not as a transaction but as the construction of a community.
What She Learned About Herself
Ask Karen what she learned from two years of fundraising, and the answer surprises her even as she says it.
"I always thought of myself as an analytical person," she says. "More of a thinking type than a feeling type. ENTJ on Myers-Briggs, if that means anything. I always played to that strength."
Then she launched a fund.
"I started realizing I'm also an extrovert. I love people. And I have this ability to bring people together around what we're doing. The community shows up for the fund in ways I never expected."
Her top five strengths in StrengthsFinder map directly onto what she's just lived through. Learner. Restorative. Activator. Command. Futuristic.
The Activator and the Futuristic built Pachamama.
The Command and Restorative carried her through two years of fundraising.
The Learner is what's going to compound this fund over the next decade.
She'd always assumed her edge was analysis. The fund showed her the edge is also activation. The ability to convene the right people around the right mission and watch them go to work for each other.
The Community Builder Who Didn't Know She Was One
Karen hosts events. Real, community IRL events. The kind where founders from completely different industries end up in the same room and walk out with co-founders, co-investors, customers, friends.
Anyone who has attended one of her gatherings knows the pattern. People show up. Things happen. The dominoes keep falling for weeks after.
That's how it works with Karen. She convenes and activates people even beyond the rooms of her events. The mission continues to fly high.
It's one of the most underrated qualities a fund manager can have, and Karen has it in spades. She just didn't know she had it until she launched the fund.
Now she does. And the next decade of Pachamama is going to be shaped by it.
What's Next: The Real Work
Karen is clear that the close of Fund I is not the finish line. It's the start of the actual work.
"Fundraising isn't really the job," she says. "The job is meeting founders, doing the diligence, making great bets, and helping the portfolio build. That's what the LPs are paying me for. That's what I got into this business to do."
The next chapter is about founders. Filling the calendar. Running the diligence. Making the early bets that will put the first markups on the board.
Fund II is on the horizon. Karen doesn't believe in long pauses between funds. Momentum begets momentum. The plan is to put a few strong early markups on the board and move to Fund II within the next year, building on the same chosen-family LP base and an expanding portfolio of climate tech founders.
"This is the fun part," she says. "This is why I started."
Why Karen's Story Matters
If you read Karen Sheffield's path closely, the lesson is the one most emerging VCs need to hear.
She didn't grow up around venture capital. She grew up around survival entrepreneurship. A pharmacy at the front of the house. A bakery in the back. A bus line her family ran on top of two full-time careers. The understanding from age six that you make a thing, you sell a thing, you keep the lights on.
She didn't start in venture. She spent 16 years in the most conventional, most predictable, most prestigious finance career on offer. American Airlines. Visa. PepsiCo. Fortune 100. The corner office was right there.
She didn't take it.
She angel-invested for four years to test the thesis. She built the network. She woke up at 2:30 in the morning with a name. She walked into a two-year fundraise that felt like ten. She came out the other side with LPs who are now her chosen family, a portfolio in motion, and a thesis that the rest of the venture world is finally arriving at.
The chip on the shoulder she carried out of Lima is the same chip every great founder she's about to back will be carrying.
Karen knows it when she sees it. That's her edge.
About Pachamama Ventures
Pachamama Ventures is an early-stage climate tech venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. The name means Mother Earth in Quechua, the ancient language of the Incas. Founded by Karen Sheffield, a former finance executive at Visa, PepsiCo, and American Airlines, with sixteen years in Fortune 100 leadership and four years of active angel investing, Pachamama Ventures backs founders building for the 2nd Industrial Revolution: the climate reindustrialization. Fund I closed with 54 LPs on the cap table. Founders can submit their companies for investment consideration at pachamamavc.com.