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Happy New Year, brown girls! ✨
While January is usually filled with goal-setting and vision boards, our community is already doing the thing - closing funds, making headlines, writing first cheques, and reshaping who gets funded and who gets to fund.
Welcome back to Brown Girls, Money Moves, your bi-weekly roundup of the headlines, money moves, and cultural moments shaping a very bold and brown future. Consider this newsletter your first reminder of 2026: we’re not waiting for permission.
Here’s what’s inside this issue:
🔥 Spicy money moves kicking off the year strong
💰 Emerging brown girl investors writing cheques
✨ Our 2026 investor & founder intentions - what we’re leaving behind and what we’re doubling down on
📊 A look back at the bold moves that defined BGA in 2025
☕️ Gupshup, pop culture tea, and community moments we loved
Pour some chai, settle in, and let’s step into 2026 together. ☕✨
spicy money moves
👑
New year, same brown girls making spicy money moves. While everyone else is still setting intentions, brown girls are already raising funds, landing covers, and setting the tone for what’s to come.
👑
💰 Female Founders Fund, led by Anu Duggal, just closed a $29M fourth fund - another reminder that backing women founders isn’t a trend, it’s a long-term strategy (and a very profitable one).
📺 Netflix’s queen of screens, Bela Bajaria, landed on the cover of Forbes - because when you shape global culture, the spotlight tends to follow.
🏡 Kindred, the home-swapping app redefining how we travel, was featured in The New York Times, spotlighting brown girl co-founder Tasneem Amina.
🎈 Marlow is officially three years old 🎂. Co-founded by Nadia Ladak and Harit Sohal, the brand continues to normalize non-toxic, no-BS period care.
💸 Synthio Labs, co-founded by Sahitya Sridhar, raised $5M in Seed funding led by Elevation Capital, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator, and strategic angels — because brown girl-led AI isn’t coming, it’s already here.
We love celebrating brown girl wins ✨ Got a recent win, milestone, or shoutout you want us to know about? 📩 Submit your win by filling out this form and let the BGA community hype you up. 🤎
the brown girl investor’s club
Where are the brown women writing cheques? Right here.
💸 Two South Asian women investors just landed on Entrepreneur’s “52 Emerging Investors Who Want You to Pitch Them Now” list.
🔥 Maya Bakhai, Founder & GP of Spice Capital
Maya is the founder and GP of Spice Capital, which seeks visionary founders building net-new ideas. Spice Capital is a first-yes firm investing into pre-seed and seed rounds. Since 2021, Spice Capital has backed 50-plus startups across AI, blockchain, fintech, consumer, and deep-tech.
⚡ Vedika Jain, GP at Weekend Fund
Vedika Jain backs early- stage startups shaping what’s next. With the support of 350-plus operator LPs, her portfolio spans weird consumer to boring (but big) B2B, led by cutting-edge founders.
This is the future we’re building at Brown Girl Angels - more brown women writing first cheques, more founders getting early yeses, and a Collective that believes community > gatekeeping.
✨ Join us in 2026. Learn more here.
new year, new spicy intentions 🎉
New year, new spicy intentions. As brown girls continue building wealth and moving capital, we’re done shrinking, whispering, and asking for permission. Here’s what we’re leaving in the group chat - and what we’re proudly bringing with us into 2026.
✨Things we’re not doing as investors in 2026✨
❌ Overlooking South Asian women in the pitch room (knock, knock: the future is here, and it’s brown)
❌ Believing angel investing isn’t for us (spoiler: it is)
❌ Treating angel investing like a secret auntie recipe
❌ Keeping our networks exclusive. (gatekeeping isn’t cute)
❌ Treating angel investing like a secret auntie recipe
❌ Underestimating the power of our capital to create impact and change
❌ Treating wealth-building like a solo journey
❌ Believing these spaces weren’t built for us
✨Things we’re doing more of in 2026 as brown girl founders✨
✅ Taking up space with BIG Brown Girl Energy
✅ Finding mentors who look like us (and becoming one for the next brown girl)
✅ Building in public (wins, lessons, pivots - all of it)
✅ Taking real chai breaks (bonus points if it’s homemade)
✅ Choosing rest without guilt (ambition still intact)
✅ Celebrating small wins loudly (yes, even that family WhatsApp shoutout)
✅ Asking for the intro, the cheque, the raise, the seat
✅ Prioritizing IRL community (dinners, coffee walks, side chats > Zoom fatigue)
✅ Building tables big enough to bring other brown girls with us
If this is your energy heading into 2026, congrats. You’ve found your people.
At Brown Girl Angels, we’re changing the narrative around who gets funded and who gets to fund - and we’re doing it together.
BROWN GIRL ANGELS 2025 WRAPPED
As we set our goals for 2026, we can’t help but celebrate the wins from 2025: a year defined by bold moves - and the brown girls brave enough to make them.
It wasn’t a “quiet building” year. It was a show up, step forward, place the bet kind of year.
From growing a global community to putting real capital behind brown-girl ventures, 2025 was all about making bigger, bolder moves - made intentionally, collectively, and with purpose.
GUPSHUP
🎤 Curious about breaking into VC? Tune into this episode of the Venture Capital Podcast, as brown girl VC Tanvi Lal shares spicy details about her VC recruiting journey.
☕️ Here’s the full tea on indē Wild’s viral Tyla concert moment.
✨ Before we fully step into 2026, a pause to thank our community. Your support, engagement and encouragement shaped this space more than you know.
This last bold and brilliant year wasn’t built in isolation, it was built with each of you. Together, we threw rotis at the wall (iykyk), gathered IRL with inspiring brown women around the world, and launched a brown girl newsletter and podcast - made for us, by us.
Thank you for showing up, subscribing, listening, engaging thoughtfully, hyping us up and building alongside us. We can’t wait to make more brown girl magic together in 2026. 🤎
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