Featured Investor | February 2024 - Sofia Montoya of Crosslink Capital

Sofia Montoya is an investor at Crosslink Capital, a generalist fund focused on Seed and Series As. Prior to joining Crosslink last summer, Sofia spent three years as a growth stage investor at Adams Street Partners. She invested in Iterable’s $200M Series E, Remote’s $150M Series B, FalconX’s $150M Series D, Altruist’s $112M Series D, and Abra’s $55M Series C while at Adams Street. Sofia started her career in healthcare investment banking after graduating from Northwestern.

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EVCA: Describe a defining moment in your career and how it shaped where you are today.

Sofia: Starting my venture career at the very onset of the pandemic – where companies were playing defense, slashing marketing budgets, uncertain for the future – to very shortly seeing the bull run of late 2020, 2021, and early 2022, to now being in the midst of this correction has been an incredible crash course on company selection. While it’s obvious on the surface, investing in these 3 distinct markets has taught me the importance of backing founders that don’t get distracted by the macro and are maniacally focused on building products that solve painful problems for their customers. The rest is just noise.

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EVCA: What is an emerging technology trend that will have a significant impact on the world in the next decade?

Sofia: There are a lot of opportunities associated with the massive intergenerational wealth transfer that’s already beginning. $80+ trillion is projected to move as baby boomers pass along their assets to their next of kin. Younger generations have very different relationships to saving, technology, wealth managers, etc. – and lots of companies are building to meet their unique needs. It’s hard to predict if or how Millennials and Gen Z will change behaviors as their wealth increases, but you can bet they’ll require digitally native solutions and investment options aligned with their values. Additionally, infrastructure needs to be built to better handle the transfer itself. Anyone who has, unfortunately, dealt with a relative passing recently can attest to that. The process from debt settlement to asset liquidation to tax compliance is costly and cumbersome, but technology (yes, AI!) and recent advancements in open banking (FedNow, RTP) should help with automation.