SAN FRANCISCO & DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bee Partners, a leading Silicon Valley pre-seed venture capital firm, which also has offices in Denver, today announced the promotion of Kira Noodleman to partner. This move reflects the firm’s evolution, the portfolio growth driven by Noodleman in key sectors including synthetic biology, robotics and the digitization of the physical world, as well as her leadership in cultivating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive networks within the firm's portfolio and in the venture capital and tech startup ecosystems.
Noodleman joined Bee Partners as a summer associate in 2016 and was promoted to principal in late 2019 as a result of substantive contributions she made to several of the firm’s key focus areas, including blockchain and robotics. Her most recent promotion reflects her ability to identify emerging opportunities within frontier markets and successfully advance portfolio companies to their next stage of investment.
“Kira's contributions to the firm and our portfolio have been felt since her first day here at Bee Partners,” said Bee Partners Founder and Managing Partner Michael Berolzheimer. “Moreover, several of her investments, at inception, have now achieved or are poised for Series A.”
As both associate and principal, Noodleman has developed a reputation among Bee Partners’ portfolio companies for being a valuable partner to the businesses she supports. In addition to coaching many early-stage founders within the portfolio, she frequently serves as an adhoc advisor and sounding board.
"Kira has become an indispensable member of our extended team,” noted Jordan Kretchmer, co-founder and CEO of Bee Partners portfolio company Rapid Robotics. “She puts founders and their companies first, invests countless hours in becoming a thought leader in the sectors she invests in, and never hesitates to share that expertise to help us make strategic decisions.”
Noodleman also spearheads Bee Partners’ DEI program, and a prominent theme in her practice at the firm has been the discovery and empowerment of founders from marginalized demographic groups.
“Almost 70 percent of the most recent companies in the portfolio that Kira has worked with are led by female founders. She has played a key role in supporting these founders in a way that truly aligns with Bee Partners’ core values and reflects the course of our future,” added Berolzheimer.
Noodleman assesses thousands of potential investment opportunities every year and serves on several portfolio company boards. In 2021, she launched and now leads the firm’s Denver practice to identify startups in non-coastal regions. She developed the firm’s theses on the robotics market, and synthetic biology, among others. In her latest white paper, she illustrates how machine-to-machine-learning (M2ML) is driving the acceleration of the digitization of the physical world - and well beyond the Industry 4.0 factory setting. M2ML is a key vector used to guide Bee Partner investments. Noodleman hypothesizes that M2ML’s primary objective is both augmenting humans and increasingly taking humans out of the loop in technological processes, thereby improving the speed, precision, and uptime of said processes, all the while and expanding the limits of human performance. M2ML’s benefits are achieved by 1) automating repeatable processes in data-rich domains and 2) “operationalizing” discovery cycles in industries where humans power most of the value.
Noodleman received her Bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School MBA program, she held product roles in various technical organizations in the Bay Area, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa. While at Haas, she leaned into venture capital as an opportunity to work with and support multiple entrepreneurs and founders.
“Bee is investing in and catalyzing the kind of change I want to see in the world,” said Noodleman. “Whether it’s feeding a hungry planet, bringing manufacturing back to America, amplifying carbontech, or expanding diversity in business, the other partners and I share a passion for partnering with inspiring and boldly audacious companies. I’m thrilled to take a seat at the partners’ table.”
About Bee Partners
Founded in 2009, by operator-turned-investor Michael Berolzheimer, Bee Partners is a pre-Seed venture capital firm that partners with revolutionary Founders working at the forefront of human-machine convergence across technologies that include robotics, AI, voice, i4.0, and synthetic biology. The firm leverages a singular approach to detecting new and emerging patterns of business as well as inside access to fertile but often overlooked entrepreneurial ecosystems to identify early opportunity in large, untapped markets. Bee’s portfolio companies consistently realize growth at levels that outstrip industry averages and have secured more than $1.5 billion of follow-on capital from the world's top VCs.
