- AI investor Kristin McDonald was just promoted to partner at NYC-based Eniac Ventures.
- McDonald started her career in NGOs and worked at hedge fund Point72 before becoming a VC.
- McDonald says she’s most excited about vertical AI startups that can take over entire industries.
Kristin McDonald’s pathway to venture capital started at a climate NGO and included a stop at a rigorous hedge fund training program. McDonald’s latest stop is as a newly promoted partner at Eniac Ventures, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
Now, she’s taking lessons learned from both industries to her role at Eniac Ventures, a New York-based VC firm founded by Nihal Mehta, to invest in early-stage startups. McDonald, who’s been working in various roles within Eniac for nearly six years, focuses on backing AI apps as well as vertical AI and some enterprise software.
She’s written checks for early-stage companies like legal tech startup Tradespace and AI sales agent Attention, the latter of which was one of BI’s Startups to Bet Your Career On in 2025.
Compared to her pre-VC career, McDonald says that at Eniac, she’s found a sweet spot: she can apply the deep financial analysis work she honed at a hedge fund to early-stage founders.
And by moving to VC, McDonald said she’s been able to lean into one of her special talents.
“I’ve learned not to lean out of things I’m good at, and in VC, that’s being an empath and supporting someone,” she said. “I like to see people who are put on this earth to build what they’re building.”
From Climate Advocacy to Wall Street to Venture Capital
After earning a degree in climate and environmental studies from Middlebury College, McDonald moved to China to complete two internships at non-governmental organizations or NGOs, focusing on project financing for renewable energy. Through the experiences, McDonald said she learned that despite having good intentions, NGOs weren’t able to have as much impact — and were the “least effective and efficient way to get things done” — compared to the business sector.
For example, McDonald said that the real estate companies she encountered cared less about environmental concerns than her NGO, yet they achieved more than her team. The realization inspired her to rethink her career and consider jobs in the private sector, and she moved back to the US in 2015 to complete an internship at hedge fund Point72, where she was eventually hired as a full-time analyst.
She said she loved how the work was rigorous and intellectually stimulating and that the public markets provided an immediate feedback loop — after coming up with numbers-based thesis evaluations on companies, she’d instantly get feedback to refine her thinking.
At the same time, she was pulling 100-hour weeks, and she didn’t like the pressure of betting against IPO-level companies.
McDonald switched gears again in 2019, joining Eniac first in a research and due diligence role before transitioning to a full-fledged investor driving her own deals. She quickly realized that compared to working as a hedge fund analyst, the best thesis doesn’t always win — especially when it comes to early-stage companies.
“The most incredible founders are way more valuable even if they haven’t proved out a great thesis,” she said. “I’ve had to learn to under-index on theses and over-index on founders.”
The future of AI is vertical
Nearly six years into her time at Eniac, McDonald has had a front-row seat to the AI boom. In addition to Tradespace and Attention, she’s written checks for data infrastructure startup Cecil Earth, robotics startup Model-Prime, and AI mental health coverage platform Nirvana Health.
Looking to 2025, McDonald is particularly interested in vertical industries that have been slow to digitize — such as healthcare, insurance, and law — and finding startups that can revolutionize an entire field with AI.
“There are a ton of industries that haven’t been updated or digitized in the last 20 years, and the lift for someone to go in and restructure a system of records, for example, is so high that the value you provide has to be an order of magnitude higher,” she said.
McDonald added that the first team that can vertically crack into a 30-year legacy system has the potential to own the entire industry for at least a little while, and that thought of dominance is an exciting prospect for her as an investor.
“It’s a go-to-market hack where if you’re the first, you’re going to be able to scale in a way you never could do with the traditional sales process,” she said. “AI represents a once-in-a-generation, massive tech paradigm shift. There’s a high appetite to try things and experiment.”
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