As Managing Partner of 412 Venture Fund, Ilana leads fund activities, including sourcing, evaluating and investing in the Pittsburgh region’s most promising startups. Ilana is co-director of the Global Anti-Hate Technology Venture Fair, which is being held in conjunction with the current conference.
Previously, Ilana was a Managing Director of Riverfront Ventures, Innovation Works’ Venture Fund for early stage companies. She also served at Innovation Works as Managing Director of Hardware and at AlphaLab Gear where she led a team that helped startups make rapid progress through the early stages of product and customer development. Earlier in her career, Ilana led and grew tech companies from startup to exit — building management teams, raising venture capital, and managing mergers and acquisitions from both ideas of the table (buyer and seller).
Ilana frequently serves in leadership roles on boards of private companies and not-for-profit organizations. Her academic background includes a B.A. in Biological Sciences and Economics from Northwestern University, and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
The Eradicating Hate Global Summit was both eye-opening and empowering. To have so many experts in the field of countering hate, all there sharing their expertise, working towards practical and real world solutions, was incredibly unique. It is this focus on meaningful conversations, answers, and solutions that makes Eradicating Hate so incredibly important. The spread of hate is a wicked problem, and the way Eradicating Hate approaches it is how we are going to solve it.
