Dharini Shukla

Dharini Shukla is a finance and investment professional who built her career in institutional private equity and venture capital before moving into corporate finance and strategy at Stripe. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business (2015–2017) and a Master of Arts from Stanford University. During business school she took on investing-adjacent roles, including MBA Summer Associate at Owl Ventures (an education-technology venture firm) and MBA Consultant at The Vistria Group (a Chicago middle-market private equity firm).

After Stanford, she joined Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP) in Chicago — one of the largest and oldest U.S. private equity firms, founded in 1992, with more than $31 billion raised across eight funds and investments in 160+ companies. She served there as a Senior Associate (June 2018–March 2020) and then Vice President (March 2020–September 2021), the role and firm reflected in the stub's contact data. MDP invests across verticals including financial services, technology, healthcare, and basic industries.

She subsequently was a Vice President at FFL Partners (August 2021–September 2022), a San Francisco-based private equity firm, and then Vice President, Private Equity & Venture Capital at Makena Capital Management (from October 2022), an endowment-model investment manager that allocates across diversified asset classes and manages capital for institutions and families. In these roles she was on the institutional/allocator side of investing rather than acting as an individual angel.

Most recently she has worked in Finance & Strategy – Partnerships at Stripe, the payments technology company, where her focus is corporate financial strategy tied to Stripe's partnership initiatives rather than external investing. Her trajectory — edtech venture, buyout, growth equity, and multi-asset endowment investing, capped by an operating-side finance role at a major fintech — reflects broad private-markets experience concentrated in technology and financial services.

• No publicly stated personal investment thesis or independent angel/seed mandate could be found; the points below describe the institutional mandates of the firms where she has invested.
• Private equity (MDP, FFL): control and growth investments in established, cash-generative businesses — sectors such as financial services, technology, healthcare, and consumer/business services in the U.S.
• Venture / edtech exposure (Owl Ventures): early exposure to education-technology venture investing during her MBA.
• Endowment / multi-asset (Makena): diversified private-markets investing across private equity and venture capital as an institutional allocator/limited partner.
• What likely earns a "yes" in these roles: strong unit economics, defensible market positions, and quality management teams — consistent with buyout and growth-equity underwriting rather than pre-revenue seed bets.