About Us

Pathlight Ventures (formerly Exponent Founders Capital) is a early stage venture firm focused on enterprise software, applied AI, healthcare, fintech, and more.

We're based out of NYC and we've been among the first builders, advisors, and investors behind companies such as Plaid, Ramp, Robinhood, Alloy, Chronosphere, Stytch, Apollo, and many more.

We are proudly backed primarily by non-profit endowments and hospitals, as well as 50 public and private unicorn founders and operators.

What We Do: We invest in a select few companies a year in the early stages of company building, from inception to series A

We strive to partner with opinionated, outlier founders with deep experience building for their customers in markets experiencing transformation.
We take a thematic market and customer driven approach towards investing and partnership - we care deeply about who we're building for and the magic it can create.
We invest across vertical AI, healthcare, fintech and payments, infrastructure, security, app software, vertical software, and more to transform the experience for the end customer.

Our Approach: We are maniacal about helping you win with your product, with your customers, and your market

We open up our entire network and ecosystem to support our founders with design customers, early hires, tactical advice, investor introductions, and much more.
We provide a sounding board for founders with strong opinions and approach problems together from a first principled basis.
We help our founders and their teams navigate through the highs and lows of building companies from the earliest stages all the way through IPO and beyond.

Team

Charley Ma, Co-Founder, Managing Partner

Charley Ma is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Pathlight Ventures. Prior to Pathlight, Charley built and scaled multiple enterprise software startups - leading their GTM teams across sales, marketing, customer success, and more from $0 to $200m as the first revenue hire for companies such as Plaid, Ramp, and Alloy. Charley grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics and minor in Mathematics. He started his career at JP Morgan across teams covering payments strategy, blockchain (before it was cool!), and R&D.
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Mahdi Raza, Co-Founder, Managing Partner

Mahdi Raza is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Pathlight Ventures. He’s particularly excited by the combination of software, payments, and AI to transform legacy industries driven by ambitious, outlier founders. Prior to Pathlight, Mahdi built and scaled Fintech and Software startups - leading growth, payments, and scaling from early stages to IPO and beyond with Robinhood and Stytch. After graduating from NYU, he started his career at Evercore in M&A focused on Exchanges, Vertical Data, Payments, and Insurance in New York and later on was an investor at GIC in Fintech and Software.
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Sean Fanning, Partner

Sean is a Partner at Pathlight Ventures. Prior to joining the team in 2024, Sean was at OpenView where he invested in expansion stage software companies and worked with OpenView's portfolio across growth/GTM/PLG and capital markets projects. Originally from the Boston-area, Sean graduated from Boston College (where he captained the rowing team), started his career in M&A with Aeris Partners advising vertical and consumer software companies, and later worked for a field services management startup, Dispatch (acquired by Vista Equity Partners).
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