Mona Elnaggar

Mona ElNaggar is a Partner at Valo Ventures, a Palo Alto–based, thesis-driven venture capital firm founded in 2018 that invests around three megatrends — climate change, the circular economy, and empowered people. Valo raised a ~$175M debut fund (reported fund size ~$179.7M) with Finnish clean-energy company Fortum as its anchor limited partner, and had backed roughly two dozen companies as of 2025. Mona brings more than fifteen years of experience across technology and finance to the firm.

Before Valo, Mona ran non-US investing for TIFF, a roughly $10 billion fund-of-funds, where she developed the strategy for and led the organization's first-ever investments in emerging markets — Africa, Brazil, and India — as well as its ESG and impact-investing efforts. Earlier in her career she co-founded and built Morgan Stanley's European Technology Investment Banking business, advising clients such as STMicroelectronics, ARM, lastminute.com, and SAP on IPOs, equity and debt financings, and M&A.

Mona is also an experienced non-executive director, including roughly a decade on the public-company board of BE Semiconductor Industries, N.V. (Besi). At Valo she serves as the firm's board director for portfolio companies including EduMe, Planera, and Wise Systems.

She holds an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, where she was recognized as an Arjay Miller Scholar, and an AB from the University of Chicago (the school she jokingly references as the one "where fun goes to die").

• Invests behind Valo's thesis of "investing for a brighter future" — digital and cloud-scale technologies applied to climate change, the circular economy, and empowering people.
• Primary personal sector focus on ClimateTech/CleanTech and FinTech.
• Typical stages: Seed to Series B, with checks roughly $100K–$5M (sweet spot ~$1.5M).
• Geographic scope: North America and Europe.
• Looks for companies applying digital technologies to create long-term economic, environmental, and social value — not impact at the expense of returns, but the two together.
• Brings deep corporate-finance, boardroom, and cross-border/emerging-markets experience — valuable for founders navigating scaling, governance, and international expansion.