Bio

Maren is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at January Ventures, a pre-seed focused firm focused on investing early and opening doors for the visionary founders of the future. Maren believes the founders of the next decade will look fundamentally different: more female, more diverse and more distributed. January Ventures backs founders based on their tenacity and ambition, not their pedigrees or who they know. January Ventures closed Fund II in March 2022. Investments focus on two themes: modern productivity and health. Maren is an engineer turned operator and entrepreneur who saw a huge problem & inefficiency in the market: the tech ecosystem is becoming increasingly diverse and distributed, yet the network driven nature of VC causes it to miss many huge opportunities. Maren started her career in the healthcare industry, working in pricing, sales, and marketing roles at Genentech. She led consumer marketing for a $1B asthma product at Genentech and she led the work on health tech investments during her time in the venture group at Applied Materials. She went on to lead marketing at a couple of early stage digital health startups, and then cofounded LittleLane, a mobile marketplace for local experiences. Maren is the mother to three young daughters, and she feels energized each day by creating a different world for them. She has an MBA from Stanford and an Engineering degree from Dartmouth. Maren is a Contributor at Forbes and The Financial Times, and she is a mentor at StartX (Stanford's accelerator program) and TechStars London.