Fellowship Spotlight: Zafra Ventures

Jessica Salinas and Phillip Sanders, the two founding GPs of VC fund, Zafra Ventures, share the experience of being the first in their family to access elite institutions of education and finance, and the perspective that often comes as a result of navigating social extremes. “To be on that line of privilege by luck and see all the fear and othering that happens to everyone around you gives you a certain perspective,” Salinas explains. Through the lens of their shared perspective, Salinas and Sanders identified a space in the market where they could create impact. “We invest in early-stage founders solving the gaps left by government and policy,” Sanders shares.

Investing in Solutions that Address Social Needs

Zafra Ventures is an early-stage venture fund investing in startups reinventing civic tech and media with the goal of closing critical gaps left by government, with a focus on founders that have lived experience with the challenges they’re setting out to solve. By strategically deploying capital to companies with innovations in media tech, civic tech, and responsible AI, Zafra Ventures is driving economic and social impact by unlocking opportunities for untapped and underrepresented innovators. Salinas and Sanders’ depth of experience in these spaces combined with their values-driven orientation, evident in their commitment to people-building and power-shifting, set them apart. They’re now launching a $20M fund to continue fueling early stage visionary founders at the intersection of civic need, media and market opportunity.

Salinas and Sanders have worked together for five years at New Rising Ventures (NRV), formerly New Media Ventures (NMV), which funds early-stage entrepreneurs and activists leveraging tech innovation to strengthen democracy, with a focus on building social power in the face of pressing social issues. Soon after getting hired as VP of investments at NRV, Salinas was in the position to bring on a hire of her own. That hire was Sanders.

That was five years ago and Salinas and Sanders are now co-presidents of NRV. “I think we’ve accomplished a lot to help the organization live up to its mission of shifting power in the United States,” Salinas reflects. Some of the ways they managed to do this include developing a new investment process and creating and launching in six week’s time a first-of-its-kind accelerator program for underrepresented leaders of news media organizations.

Noticing a Gap in the Market

“Along the way, we’ve invested in civic tech, advocacy and organizing, and media,” Sanders shares, “and throughout the process, we’ve noticed that founders are solving critical issues but they aren’t necessarily getting the funding, in part because other investors aren’t looking at these opportunities as having the potential for high ROI.” 

In late 2021, they found themselves in a political context that aligned with their organizational goals. “We did a landscape analysis of where capital needed to be deployed if we wanted to keep building on the momentum of the moment,” Salinas explains, “and we found huge gaps in funding innovation in new digital media platforms.” Motivated by their observations, the critical political moment, and questions from investors and supporters of NRV about how they might keep deepening their work and impact, Salinas and Sanders leveraged their strong track record, brand, and network to launch Zafra Ventures as a spinoff to stand in the gap between deserving founders and the capital they need. 

“This issue is directly impacting communities we care about,” Salinas says. “Our hypothesis was that, if Trump won, a lot of communities and important verticals would be left behind, through policy or through direct actions. And we’re seeing that play out now.” Getting out ahead of the policy shifts they anticipated, Salinas and Sanders tested out their thesis as they carried out their NMV work, positioning them to launch more confidently and more effectively, bearing insights that made clear to them a high-leverage point for investment. “We know that when government and policy starts excluding or suppressing people, then the people will innovate more and step up for their communities and industries to create better systems,” Salinas says. 

She and Sanders are living proof of this, taking the initiative to catch some of what’s being dropped by the government. “We come in with a sense of confidence that with additional LPs and mission-aligned investors, we can do things even bigger. It’s not just an idea we want to test out,” Sanders clarifies. “It’s already been tested, and this is the next phase on a larger scale, staying with a founder from early stage through Series A.” 

Salinas’ Journey: From Education to Entrepreneurship

The daughter of formerly undocumented immigrants, the first in her family to be born in the U.S. and the first to go to college, Salinas was raised in Texas in a large Mexican family. When she attended Stanford for her undergraduate studies, immersed in a high concentration of class privilege, she had a front row seat to the ways in which the system benefits some particular people while disadvantaging others. 

When she had the option upon graduating to go the Silicon Valley route or to take a more community-oriented route and, in her own words, “go with the people,” she chose the latter. She was operations manager at a charter high school in East Palo Alto, CA before working at The Foundation for Hispanic Education in East San Jose, co-authoring the first statistically significant report on the state of Latino entrepreneurship in the U.S., and starting a program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to address the report findings by supporting Latino entrepreneurs. The program has since graduated over 1,200 entrepreneurs. Salinas then focused her MBA studies at USC on social entrepreneurship to investigate whether it was really possible to marry profit and purpose – something she was skeptical about at the time. 

While at USC, Salinas met the CEO of Headspace and ended up getting hired to the company’s founding B2B team and co-leading the creation of their social impact team before pivoting to impact investing. She then worked at a small fund focused on poverty, pollution, and hunger. As her career was taking impressive shape, she continued to see imbalances of power and privilege play out around her. “I felt called to marry what I was doing in my free time to my professional life,” she says of her motivation for taking a job at New Media Ventures. “I wanted to be part of directing capital to founders and entrepreneurs that nobody else was going to direct it to.” She says that Zafra Ventures gives her and Sanders the chance to do this at 100X.

Sanders’ Journey: From the South Side to Startup Investing

Sanders, also the first in his family to go to college, was raised on the South Side of Chicago by his single mother. “Chicago – and especially the South Side – is very segregated,” he says. “But I was raised with a strong Black community and able to see early on the power of community. There was a lot of unemployment and funding cuts, but there was still love and bright spots.” As the oldest sibling and only brother, he felt responsible to protect his mother and two younger sisters. Combined with his grandparents’ consistent presence and encouragement to focus on education, this sense of responsibility kept him focused and on track for success. “I wanted to go to college,” he says, “but it was always a question of how. No one around me knew the college application process or how to fill out a FAFSA.” 

After managing to find his way through the unfamiliar, Sanders was admitted to Fisk University, but ultimately couldn’t attend due to financial barriers. He instead ended up moving to Florida to stay with family and working his way through school at another HBCU, Bethune-Cookman University, where he excelled in finance and accounting while continuing to support his family. While at school, PricewaterhouseCoopers flew him to San Francisco to interview for an internship, and other Big Four firms invited him to interview during the same trip, all of them ultimately extending offers. He went with Ernst & Young, where he had an eye-opening experience in a world that was totally new and different to him. “It was a total culture shift for me,” he says. “It really opened my mind.” 

Marrying Profit & Purpose

Sanders ended up returning to Ernst & Young to start his career after graduating. “Being at Ernst & Young, having clients in the VC space, startup, and pre-IPO gave me a lot of exposure to founders and understanding of how and why they got funded,” he shares. His next career stop was to Kapor Center (now Kapor Capital) where he spent five years building out the company’s accounting and back office – and lending insights to founders in his down time. 

He worked on a social impact report at Kapor that showed social impact startups could deliver returns on par with traditional venture investments. “I really wanted to hone in on this,” he recalls, which led him to begin investing directly. Writing small checks gave him a seat at the table with other investors and firsthand insight into what distinguishes a strong founder and a promising product. As he built his portfolio, he also built meaningful relationships that opened doors to higher-profile deals and broader networks within the venture ecosystem. Over time, that hands-on experience evolved into a new advisory role; supporting VC funds, early-stage startups, and accelerators focused on impact and sustainable growth.

One high-profile deal that he and Salinas were able to access through their combined network is Some Friends, a media company that tells stories by and about people of color, for everybody. Some Friends ended up creating social media sensation Subway Takes, a platform that shares interviews with a diverse range of people on NYC subway platforms. “We were their first institutional investors,” Sanders shares. “We advised them on strategy, and we believed in them before they came up with this breakthrough platform concept.”

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

“The fellowship has been wonderful,” Sanders says of his experience in the VC Include Fellowship. “Every week has been extremely impactful, everything is relevant, and my concept of what a fellowship is has completely changed.” He points to the intimacy of the VC Include cohort and wider community. “I love that the speakers and other guests are available to be a value-add to us outside of the fellowship. That’s powerful. It wasn’t just about a lecture or webinar. We’ve been able to develop actual connections.”

Jessica and Phil’s long-standing relationship was core to their acceptance into the Fellowship. Their balanced strengths and deep commitment to each other and to bettering their community will be a key ingredient in their success. We hope and trust that the connections they made during the program, and the VCI community, will facilitate and expand the important work that Zafra Ventures is doing.