Monique Villa

Monique Villa Capra is a Nashville-based venture capitalist with more than 14 years of early-stage startup and investing experience. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in visual media (interdisciplinary studies) from the University of California, Irvine, after graduating with honors from Long Beach City College. She began her career in Los Angeles, starting with an internship at TOMS handling finance and inventory management, and went on to hold roles at TAG Strategic, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), and NPR flagship station KCRW 89.9FM. She later moved into venture capital operating roles at Velos Partners (LA/Singapore) and the fintech-focused fund Core Innovation Capital (LA/San Francisco).

In late 2017 she relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville and joined Mucker Capital, the Santa Monica–based seed/Series A fund known for investing in startups outside Silicon Valley. There she launched Mucker's first satellite office, in Nashville, and spent nearly four years sourcing seed and Series A investments across Tennessee, the Southeast, and North America. Alongside Mucker she founded Modern Capital, a research-and-education organization producing regional ecosystem data (such as a Tennessee Female Founder Report) and running a Venture Fellow program for students, and in 2018 co-founded Build In the Southeast (Build In SE) with Grace Huebner to knit together the region's startup communities. In 2021 Business Insider named her a "Rising Star in Venture Capital."

In mid-2022 she stepped back from her full-time Mucker role (becoming an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, an advisory relationship that ended in 2025) and became Launch Tennessee's first-ever Chief Investment Officer. In that public-private role (2022–2023) she built and launched the $70M InvestTN family of funds and led the work to qualify Tennessee for federal SSBCI 2.0 capital, positioning the state's roughly $1B small-business and venture-capital vision. She has also served as a Senior Investment Advisor at Beyond Ventures and sits on the board of directors of SomosVC.

Most recently, she founded and now serves as Managing Partner of Daytrip Ventures, a Nashville-based fund investing in "pre-scale" (pre–Series A) companies across the New American South. The thesis leans on the South's rapid growth and talent in-migration — she cites the region capturing the overwhelming majority of U.S. population growth — and what she calls a "proximity advantage to the fastest growing economy."

• Invests at the earliest institutional stages — pre-seed, seed, and pre–Series A ("pre-scale") — backing capital-efficient startups building outside coastal tech hubs.
• Deep regional conviction: she argues the Southeast's shortfall of large exits traces back to a gap in early-stage capital and cross-city connectivity — *"There's this theme where people say, 'Well, there haven't been as many large exits in this part of the country.' Why is that? I really believe it starts with that early-stage capital formation."*
• Daytrip's core bet is geographic and demographic: capitalizing on the New American South's economic and population growth and the migration of operators from coastal hubs — *"Daytrip is about recognizing and leveraging a proximity advantage to the fastest growing economy."*
• Sector preferences skew to software-driven businesses: SMB software, SaaS, fintech/payments, insurance, proptech/real estate, e-commerce, health IT, and future of work; she deliberately steers away from medical devices, non-SaaS hardware, and life sciences.
• At Mucker her checks ran roughly $100K–$5M (about $1M typical); she looks for market-defining companies and founders solving real problems in underserved markets.