CP

Cindy Padnos

Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures

San Francisco Bay Area

Overview 

Cindy Padnos is the Founder & Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a focus on investing in various sectors and stages, including LegalTech, Human Capital/HRTech, and MarketingTech. She has successfully invested in companies like Contentstack and Arkestro, demonstrating her expertise in SaaS, venture capital, and strategic partnerships. Padnos holds an MSIA/MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and has leveraged her skills in entrepreneurship and enterprise software to support startups like Birdie and BrightEdge as an investor and board member, highlighting her leadership in the tech industry.

Work Experience 

IV

Illuminate Ventures

  • Founder & Managing Partner

    2010 - Current

Illuminate Ventures invests in "further along" Seed-stage companies delivering B2B/enterprise software solutions with rapid, measurable ROI.

illuminate.com
C

Contentstack

  • Investor

    2018

Contentstack is the leading composable digital experience platform (DXP) provider used by enterprises to deliver digital experiences.

Raised $169,000,000.00 from Georgian, Insight Partners and Illuminate Ventures.

contentstack.com
A

Arkestro

  • Investor & Board Member

    2018

Arkestro is a predictive procurement software for businesses to boost savings and supply chain performance.

Raised $27,950,000.00 from Construct Capital, El Cap Holdings, Cervin Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Tenacity Venture Capital, Correlation Ventures, Four More Capital, Forum Ventures, Illuminate Ventures and Koch Disruptive Technologies.

arkestro.com
B

Birdie

  • Investor & Board Member

    2022

P

Provarity.AI

  • Investor

    2024

B-

Brevity - Your A.I. Sales Coach

  • Investor

    2024

L

Labra

  • Investor

    2025

BA

Bedrock Analytics

  • Investor and Board Observer

    2015

Bedrock Analytics SaaS application for the CPG vertical leverages ML to assist sales managers in automating selling pitches for retail.

Raised $7,000,000.00 from L'ATTITUDE Ventures.

bedrockanalytics.com
JS

JetStream Software, Inc

  • Investor and Board Observer

    2019

TA

TAZI AI Systems

  • Investor

    2022

Business In The Loop™ AI/GenAI Platform

Raised $6,200,000.00 from Illuminate Ventures, Handshake Ventures, Diffusion Capital Partners, Foothill Ventures, Alchemist Accelerator and Diffusion Capital Partners.

tazi.ai

Education 

Investments 

Perceptive Panda

Pre-Seed

Total funding amount not yet available

MPathic

Seed

Total funding: $5.2M

Contentstack

Seed

Total funding: $170M

Arkestro

Seed

Total funding: $31M

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