Fellowship Spotlight: Kaya Ventures

Madeline Darcy’s “why” is baked into her personal connection to and name of her fund— Kaya Ventures. Her thesis is driven by her daily mantra and her family legacy.

A Personal Origin Story

Káya is a Tagalog word that means “to be able to.” Growing up, when Darcy was feeling discouraged, her dad, who immigrated from the Philippines, would remind her, “Káya mo.” You can do it.

This built into her a sense of resilience, which she sees reflected in the entrepreneurs at the center of her work. As Darcy shares, the fund’s name underscores that Kaya Ventures is grounded in an origin story and personal mission rather than throwing a dart and hoping for the best results. 

Filling the Gap

Darcy launched Kaya Ventures on the heels of a successful career run as an angel investor and advisor to companies in the digital health, consumer technologies, and future of work industries. Along with her background as a senior consultant at Oliver Wyman, GP at CircleUp, and early team member of Victress Capital’s first institutional fund, this career experience informs and enriches the focus, strategy, and promise of Darcy’s fund.

Kaya Ventures is an early stage fund investing in companies that democratize and expand access to health and wellness. The fund makes most of its investments in pre-seed rounds, overlooked sectors, and impactful solutions. They fill the “friends and family” gap that women, older founders, and people of color experience due to the many ways our society is segregated, which ultimately separates these populations from the in-network wealth that particularly White entrepreneurs have more proximity to. 

“We’re really looking to be an institutional partner in that early stage of growth, and to work with those entrepreneurs as whole people on their leadership journey.” Leveraging Darcy’s lived experience to secure a unique market position, Kaya invests where conventional funds lack access and understanding.  

An Expanded Perspective

Looking back on her childhood, as one of 13 children in a blended family, Darcy can recognize that her family didn’t have much in a material sense. But with the blessing of strong familial relationships and a more robust social safety net in Australia, where she grew up, this wasn’t something she was particularly aware of or consciously affected by as a young person. 

Darcy’s parents divorced when she was young, and her father went to live in a traditional Indigenous community, exposing her to what she describes as more of a barter system than the capitalism-driven environment she encountered years later in the States. “I had some really early experiences understanding discrepancies in access, specifically looking in Australia through the lens of an Indigenous community.” 

Upon relocating, despite observing differences in the particulars of inequities, Darcy saw a parallel among groups of Americans — Black and Latinx populations, in her experience — who lacked the access that more systematically privileged groups were granted with ease.

Early in her time living in the U.S., without healthcare or a credit score, Darcy found herself in need of an ambulance. With Australia’s single-payer healthcare system as her only frame of reference, where she observed her mother’s relative ease in receiving ongoing care for a chronic illness, she describes the incident as inspiring a case of “sticker shock.” Alarmed by the high price for the misfortune of an accident, Darcy again found herself sharpening her lens on the tangible implications of not having access. 

The Power of Access

Darcy’s personal journey is a testament to just how quickly simple access can transform someone’s ability to create impact. Her parents are working class people, and, “They just weren’t in the business world,” Darcy says, acknowledging what a game changer exposure and familiarity can be. “It’s very different for someone to get from a to b,” she shares, “when they started out essentially having the framework and the toolkit and all of the resources to understand how to get there, than someone who went from a to b not even knowing what b was.”

Upon gaining access to some of the more elite higher education institutions in the States, Darcy quickly came to understand education as crucial to being able to do what she wanted in the world. In Darcy’s words — as well as her lived experience — access into such institutions can, “bring you into a different sphere of knowledge and network.” In undergrad, she wasn’t aware that venture capital even existed; yet, straight out of earning her MBA from Harvard University, Darcy made more income in the first year of her post-graduate career than her parents ever made in a year. This drastic shift over just one generation cemented her belief in the power of access. 

The Power of Entrepreneurship

Darcy eventually came to also see entrepreneurship as a means for creating impact and generating wealth. In the earlier part of her career, when she worked in VC, angel investing, and consulting, she thought about success through more conventional standards. As time passed and her understanding expanded, she began asking herself, “What is the impact that I want to have, and how can I really impact the industries I want to serve?” 

Armed with an understanding that it’s typically late-stage companies who are seeking innovative ideas and early-stage entrepreneurs who are the driving force behind such ideas, alongside her knowledge that the system fails to invest sufficiently in “soon-to-be majority populations,” Darcy knew that she could apply her expertise and lived experience to help solve this problem in the VC world. 

Today Kaya Ventures is having success seeing early-stage markups across its portfolio that validate the fund’s thesis and its focus on the sectors of women’s health, care economy, financial inclusion, and nutrition. 

The Impact of the VC Include Fellowship

While reflecting on her participation in the VCI Fellowship, Darcy elevates how special it was to be among a group of diverse emerging managers and LPs who truly believe in the potential of a more diverse asset management field.

With just 1.4% of $80+ trillion AUM managed by diverse or women-led firms, she acknowledges of the VC Include community, “We are a very small microcosm of what exists in this industry.” This fact reinforces her feeling that, “It’s really special to find a world in which folks are excelling at what they’re doing and have strategies that have so much potential, while also finding affinity in a group that has diverse backgrounds and experiences.” 

She also feels grateful for the complex lens that VCI applies to the conversation about impact. “There’s been a narrative that plays out: you’re either investing for profit or investing for impact, but not a both/and.” Darcy has benefited from VCI modeling that it’s possible to disprove this false binary by investing for both profit and impact. 

Finally, she points to the combination of realism and encouragement she encountered in the fellowship. Mentors, teachers, and guest speakers were transparent about the difficult road ahead, while also supporting fellows to push forward and trust in their ideas. “It would be much easier for any of us to join a firm and have a salary than go the road we’re going,” she says. But the clear message she got from everyone at VCI is that, “It’s a difficult journey, but one that’s worth pursuing.” 

And to that, all of us at VCI say, “Kaya mo, Madeline.” You can do it!