Speaker > Biography

Valeria Budinich

Vice President
Ashoka
Lima

Valeria Budinich has been at the helm of thinking how to link entrepreneurs with venture capital. For twenty years, she has created and expanded business development programs in twenty-two countries worldwide. At Ashoka, she is Vice President of the organization and runs the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative (FEC) in which she enables commercial alliances between social entrepreneurs and private companies to deliver products and services to small producers and low-income families. The core of her work is in harnessing the collective power of social and business entrepreneurs.

Valeria has modeled several successful strategies for connecting small entrepreneurs with capital. She worked at Appropriate Technology International (ATI), a global non-profit foundation specializing in providing technical and financial assistance to small and medium sized enterprises in rural areas. As its Chief Operating Officer, she became a leader in her field on thinking about small producers. She then worked at Endeavor, a foundation specialized in linking entrepreneurs in emerging economies with venture capital investors in the US. She later worked at BDA, a California-based consulting firm, where she developed innovative services for small and medium scale entrepreneurs and launched the first seed capital fund in Chile that exclusively finances enterprises in their start-up phase.

Valeria is a vital connector between entrepreneurs and capital, pushing the boundaries of innovative thinking.