There's a story Mala Ramakrishnan tells about her mother that explains most of what she's built since.

Women systematically have been held behind across cultures and countries until just the last few decades, even in countries as advanced as the United States. If you look around the workplace, especially in tech where all the wealth is built, you'll realize older women especially have been weeded out of the system. Mala has made this disparity the focal point of her mission, starting with herself.

In the late nineties, working women were frowned upon in India where Mala comes from. And just a generation before her, her own mother had to go on a hunger strike for a week to fight her parents just to go to college. Her father and every male ancestor she can name were professors of economics and agricultural sciences, research scientists, academics.

The men were educated. The women stayed home.

"My mother was so frustrated," Mala says. "She couldn't work. She wanted to be her own person. And so she empowered the three of us, her daughters, to be like wild dragons."

Mala was raised to defy norms. While people looked up astrological charts to predict futures, Mala's mother would define hers. She would tell her that she would always be wealthy, be a leader, and would work on the cutting edge of everything new and innovative. As a kid, her mother encouraged her to be an engineer because she was good at math. Mala started programming when she was 12 years old, in seventh grade. Throughout her teen years she won every programming and math contest. She applied to Stanford University as a 21 year old and got accepted, her ticket of freedom out of the conservative society India was at the time.

Mala says that when there are no role models, the sky is the limit. You can literally be anything you want to be, even the sky.

Thirty-some years later, Mala has closed a $12 million venture fund from her house in Palo Alto, a mile from where her mother now lives.

Progressive Ventures is a seed stage venture firm investing in AI and enterprise startups. Mala sources primarily out of Y Combinator, StartX, and Berkeley SkyDeck. The Fund I portfolio includes positions in 38 frontier AI startups.

Fund I closed at $12 million from 94 LPs. Mala stopped accepting commitments in August 2026.

The fund's structure is deliberately simple. Where it gets interesting is what she does with it, and what she does around it.

Mala started her first company at 21, as a graduate student at Stanford, when her team won a $50,000 first prize in a business plan competition.

"I had a couple of friends who believed in me and said, hey, do you want to join us to do this? And I thought it was just beyond me to even think of running a business."

The company built IT service ticketing on Motorola handsets. In an era before cloud services, before smartphones, the problem was routing: how do you find the shortest path for a technician driving around fixing computers? Mala's own first job at Stanford had been driving a golf cart around campus fixing machines in underground dorm rooms. She'd lived with the problem before she built the software for it.

They sold that company. Then she built another, funded by Stanford Research Institute's venture arm. Then a third, which was funded entirely off a customer contract from Dish Networks and never took venture money at all.

In between the companies, she ran products at scale: WhatsApp Privacy Head at Meta, Data Engineering at Cloudera, Middleware Cloud Services at Oracle, industry cloud for life sciences at Veeva.

Three exits. Multiple platform-scale product roles. And a very specific first memory of venture capital.

"My first interaction with a venture capitalist was very pivotal for me. To realize that somebody would just give you cash for your potential. They believed in me."

That was Guy Kawasaki. Mala has been trying to be that person for someone else ever since.

Mala went into VC Lab planning to raise a $1 million fund.

Mike Suprovici told her $1 million was too little.

"I was like, oh my gosh, okay, let's make it two million dollars. And I thought, oh my god, how are we going to raise two million dollars?"

They incorporated at $3 million. She hit $3 million in about three months.

"That was the pivotal moment. I thought three million was a lot of money. And quickly realized, it's so little money."

She raised seven million more across the following year, hitting $10 million by December. Then another $2.2 million after that.

Twelve million dollars, raised from 94 LPs, almost entirely from within a three-mile radius of her house in Palo Alto. Her teenage sons still come home from school at three o'clock. She's still there when they do.

Ask her what she learned about herself, and she doesn't say "I learned I could raise, where I am the product." She says something more uncomfortable:

"I think I could have done twenty five million on this fund itself. It's just that I didn't allow myself at the beginning."

That's the whole thesis of her nonprofit in one sentence, delivered about herself.

Mala started Progressive Ventures with a specific intention: invest in underrepresented founders, especially women.

Then she went to source deals at the top accelerators to show returns on the fund. And found a supply problem.

"If you go after the top accelerators, YC, StartX, SkyDeck, there just aren't enough women. I used to think maybe there's a bias, that they're being eliminated. But I'm increasingly realizing there's a supply problem."

More women are starting businesses. Fewer are starting venture-scale companies.

"A lot are thinking very small. A services company, a smaller mindset, instead of dreaming big. It seems like fewer women tend to think big, start venture-scale businesses, take on bigger risks."

This is the kind of finding that could easily curdle into a complaint. Mala turned it into infrastructure.

Alongside the fund, Mala runs Founders Creative, a nonprofit community of over 40,000 founders, investors, and executives across Silicon Valley. It runs a pre-seed accelerator program that feeds into the top accelerator programs downstream and supports them in go-to-market.

Fifty percent of its founders are women.

"I think venture capital can be a force for good, but writing checks is not the only way we can make it equitable. We need to help people from the ground first. Step up and say, you can do it too."

The logic is straightforward and slightly brutal: if the pipeline into YC and StartX doesn't have enough women in it, writing checks at the seed stage won't fix that. You have to intervene earlier, at the moment where someone decides whether their idea is a business or a company.

Which is precisely the moment two friends intervened for Mala at 21.

"That's what needs to happen more and more. We need to change the model at the very beginning, so that women's mindsets change and make everything possible for them."

She's set up an endowment fund so the nonprofit continues past her involvement. It doesn't generate revenue. She does it anyway.

"It's a huge lift but the mission is big. We're trying to start that movement."

Two statistics come up repeatedly in conversation with Mala, and they explain the urgency behind both the fund and the nonprofit.

Less than 2% of venture funding goes to women.

Less than 0.1% of companies founded in the US each year are venture-backed. Those companies account for roughly 20% of US GDP.

Put those together and the picture sharpens: the highest-leverage wealth creation engine in the American economy touches a vanishingly small number of companies, and women are almost entirely excluded from it.

"We're fifty percent of the population and we're not building the kind of wealth that men are. How can that be today?"

Ask Mala about legacy and she answers as a mother first.

"I want to leave a legacy for my own sons, not to see a world that's inequitable towards women. I want to see fifty percent representation by women in every room that matters. Boardrooms. Founding teams. Wherever there's power and wealth."

And she's already redrawing her own ceiling again.

"I'm going to do another fund. I'm going to keep doing this. A bigger fund increases your ownership in the companies you invest in. It gives you more power, more responsibility, bigger impact."

Then, mostly joking: "Maybe I could do a hundred billion dollars someday."

Then, not joking at all: "It's about the scale you can process in your mind as you keep growing. How much permission did you give yourself to think big? How much will you let yourself seek?"

Progressive Ventures is a case study in something the emerging manager world doesn't talk about enough: the constraint on fund size is frequently not the market. It's the manager's own imagination.

Mala walked in planning $1 million. She closed $12 million. Her honest read is that $25 million was available if she'd asked for it at the start.

For any operator sitting on 20 years of experience and a fund idea they're rounding down, that's the takeaway. Not "raise more." Just: check whether the number you picked is a market constraint or a permission constraint.

And Mala is doing the same thing for founders upstream that Guy Kawasaki did for her at 21. Somebody has to be the person who says the thing out loud.

"Just like what happened to me. Out of the blue, a couple of friends said, hey, come on. You can join us. You can do it too."

Progressive Ventures is a seed venture fund investing in AI and enterprise startups, sourcing primarily from Y Combinator, StartX, and Berkeley SkyDeck. Founded and led by Mala Ramakrishnan, a multi-exit founder and product executive whose companies include Cuvo (acquired, deployed at AT&T), Aeroprise (acquired by BMC), and Mavantis (RPA SaaS, exited), with product leadership roles at Meta, Cloudera, Oracle, and Veeva. She is also the founder of Founders Creative, a nonprofit community of 40,000+ Silicon Valley founders, investors, and executives, a Stanford Women on Boards member, and a Forbes Business Council contributor.

VC Lab is the world's leading venture capital accelerator, launching over 50% of all new venture capital firms started each year. The program trains emerging managers to launch and grow meaningful early-stage investment firms. Learn more at govclab.com.

Decile Group is on a mission to turn venture capital into a force for good. The company runs VC Lab, the leading accelerator for new venture capital firms worldwide. Decile Group also runs Decile Hub (the agentic VC back office), Emerging Institute (the institutional LP readiness program), and Decile Capital (a top-performing fund of funds). Learn more at decilegroup.com.