Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith is the founder and General Partner of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, an early-stage venture firm founded in 2023 and focused on technical founders building products for technical users. Vermilion announced a $13 million debut fund in February 2025 and a $25 million Fund II on July 8, 2026. TechCrunch described Smith as an operator-turned-investor and one of the few solo women GPs in venture capital.

Before founding Vermilion, Smith built go-to-market and marketing teams at developer-focused technology companies. OpenView’s 2019 announcement said she joined the firm from GitHub, where she was VP of Marketing and led global go-to-market initiatives. Before GitHub, she was Chief Marketing Officer at GitLab and held marketing roles at Google Maps, Facebook, Parse, and Twilio.

Her earlier GitLab profile states that she was based in New York City, had an engineering background, got her start at Twilio, led marketing at Parse, and then worked at Google Maps before joining GitLab. Fortune reported that Smith grew up in Hazlehurst, Georgia, studied biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech, and later moved into startup marketing and venture capital.

At OpenView, Smith joined as Venture Partner in April 2019 to help develop the firm’s Product Led Growth practice. OpenView positioned her role around helping SaaS companies that lead with product-led growth, citing her experience with developer products, community building, and global go-to-market work.

• Vermilion’s core thesis is to back “technical founders building technical products,” with the firm site naming developer tools, infrastructure, AI, data, and security as focus areas.
• The firm invests at pre-seed and seed and says it is “often the first yes.”
• Current Fund II strategy, according to TechCrunch and Smith’s own July 2026 post, is to back technical founders building for technical users in AI infrastructure, security, and developer tooling.
• Vermilion’s firm site says it writes $200K-$500K checks at pre-seed and seed and helps founders with GTM, hiring a first marketing lead, launch messaging, and turning early customers into champions.
• TechCrunch reported that Fund II will write average checks of $500K-$1M and aims to invest in at least 25 companies over roughly two and a half years.
• Smith’s stated founder bar emphasizes builders over polish: the firm says it invests in “engineers, designers, product-obsessed founders with a point of view” and that founders do not need revenue, but do need “conviction, clarity, and curiosity.”
• Smith’s own launch post summarized the fund as investing in “technical founders building technical products” across developer, data, infrastructure, security, and tools that help developers create better products.