Cynthia B. Padnos

Stages: Debt - General, Debt Refinancing, Early Stage VC, IPO, Later Stage VC, Seed Round
Focus: Software
Location: Oakland, CA

Founder & Managing Partner · Illuminate Ventures

Cynthia B. Padnos (Cindy Padnos) is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures, a women-led Micro VC that invests exclusively in **pre-seed and seed-stage B2B/enterprise software** companies, particularly in **cloud computing, SaaS, mobile software, and Big Data**[2][3][5]. She typically serves as a company’s **first institutional investor**, deploying check sizes ranging from **