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 

  • Founder & Managing Partner

    2009 - Current

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

  • 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.

  • Investor & Board Member

    2022

  • Investor & Board Member

    2008

BrightEdge, an SEO platform delivering an uplifted ROI, enables marketers to increase revenue from organic search.

Raised $61,900,000.00 from Insight Partners, Illuminate Ventures, Intel Capital, Battery Ventures and Altos Ventures.

  • Investor & Board Member

    2017

Pex is a digital rights technology company.

Raised $64,000,000.00 from Susa Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, Tapestry VC, Illuminate Ventures, Amaranthine, Cue Ball, Evolution VC Partners, Tencent Music Entertainment and Tencent.

  • Investor

    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.

  • 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.

  • Investor

    2012

Raydiant is the leading in-location experience platform for the world's largest brands

Raised $70,234,358.00 from Illuminate Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, XRC Ventures, Atomic, Haveli, Gaingels, 8VC, Mark Wahlberg and CABRA VC.

  • 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.

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