Kumar Dandapani

Managing Partner

Kumar Dandapani is a Managing Partner at Cadenza. Prior to co-founding Cadenza, Kumar started BitMEX Ventures. Earlier in his career, Kumar was the Head of Data Science at Norwest Venture Partners as well as a quant and derivatives trader at Evolution Capital Management and Cornerstone Trading Company. Kumar holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering and a B.A. in Social & Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Max Shapiro

Managing Partner

Max Shapiro is a Managing Partner at Cadenza. Prior to co-founding Cadenza, Max was an Investment Principal at BitMEX Ventures. Earlier in his career, Max was an Investment Associate at Blue Line Advisors, Inc. where he focused on middle market leveraged buyout. Max was also a Financial Consultant at Deloitte where he served private equity and investment banking clients. Max is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Max also holds a M.S. in Finance & Accounting and a B.S. in Finance & Accounting from Binghamton University.

Harris Wellner

Operating Partner

Harris Wellner is the Operating Partner of Cadenza and joined the firm in 2022. Prior to joining Cadenza, Harris was a Vice President at Angelo Gordon in the firm’s real estate private equity group and managed a portfolio across the Southeast U.S. valued at over $2 billion. He also was responsible for the portfolio management of U.S. real estate funds. Prior to Angelo Gordon, Harris was a senior associate at Grant Thornton, principally focusing on private equity and hedge funds. Harris is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in Accounting from the School of Management at Binghamton University.

Eric Meltzer

Principal

Eric Meltzer is a Principal at Cadenza. Prior to Cadenza, Eric served as a Portfolio Manager for the Digital Asset Investment Arm at a large US family office. He was responsible for managing the Liquid and Venture books with an AUM of over $60m. Prior to the family office, Eric served as a Senior Institutional Sales Trader at FalconX where he managed over $500M in annual transaction volume for Hedge Fund and VC clients. Prior to FalconX, Eric was a Relationship Manager at BlackRock for six years in the Aladdin Business. Eric received his Bachelor of Science degree from Vanderbilt University in 2017.

Kelly Yip

Entrepreneur in Residence

Kelly Yip is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Cadenza. Prior to joining Cadenza, she was a Summer Analyst at Greycroft in New York focusing on early-stage consumer brands. Previously, she also interned at Enlight Growth Partners in Shanghai investing in early-growth stage SaaS and AI companies. Kelly received her Bachelor of Science degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Finance and Management.

Andrew Liu

Associate

Andrew Liu is an Associate at Cadenza. Prior to joining, he was an Analyst at Cambridge Associates in San Francisco. Previously, he was also a Banking Summer Analyst in TMT at Wedbush and Flight Electronics intern at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Andrew holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.

Richarde Li

Associate

Richarde Li is an Associate at Cadenza. Prior to joining, he completed a research thesis on agent-driven equities trading models and market volatility, which was awarded the highest academic grade at the University of Sydney. Previously, he was an Equity Research Visiting Analyst in TMT at Conduit Capital (now Infusive Asset Management). Richarde holds a Bachelor of Advanced Computing and a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in Computational Data Science and Finance from the University of Sydney.

Ben Spong

PredictEX, GM

Ben Spong is the General Manager at PredictEX. He has been active in the crypto space for six years, with deep domain expertise in DeFi protocols and perpetuals trading. Prior to joining Cadenza to lead PredictEX, he served as an Investment Analyst at Third Prime, focusing on early-stage venture deals. Previously, he led the University of Wisconsin-Madison's premier blockchain organization, Badger Blockchain. Ben received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he majored in Economics and Mathematics.

Alex Acero

Venture Partner

Alex Acero is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He is a world-renowned engineer. In 2025, Dr. Acero was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Most recently, Dr. Acero was a Sr. Distinguished Engineer and Siri Chief Scientist leading speech and language technology for Siri. Prior to joining Apple in 2013, he spent 20 years at Microsoft Research leading teams in speech, audio, multimedia, computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, machine learning, and information retrieval. Alex is an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington and a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA. Alex has served the IEEE in many leadership roles including the Board of Directors of IEEE and the IEEE Foundation, and as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alex is author of the textbook "Spoken Language Processing", over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents. Alex holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Vipul Ved Prakash

Venture Partner

Vipul Ved Prakash is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He is a world class technologist with years of experience across AI, ML, decentralized technologies, data science and engineering. Vipul started his career as an engineer at Napster and Tradeindia.com before founding Cloudmark (acquired by Proofpoint). Vipul later founded Topsy, a social media search and analytics service that was acquired by Apple in 2013. At Apple, Vipul was a Senior Director and led a team of 250+ engineers. More recently, Vipul launched Together.ai; a cloud platform for open source AI models.

Tim Tickel

Venture Partner

Tim Tickel is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He is a seasoned Security Software Engineer with over 20 years of industry experience and a passion for blockchain technologies. Throughout his career, he has focused on developing robust, user-friendly security infrastructure for companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Reddit, Plaid, and BitMEX. Tim's expertise covers a wide range of security domains, such as key management, authentication and authorization, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and data protection, enabling him to consistently deliver innovative and reliable security solutions. Tim holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University and an M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University.

Christopher Biettchert

Venture Partner

Christopher Biettchert is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He brings over two decades of security expertise, specializing in threat detection, incident response, and penetration testing. He has a proven track record of identifying and mitigating complex risks at leading organizations including Google, Facebook, Square, the National Security Agency, and Aurora Innovation.

Pedro Moreno Mengibar

Venture Partner

Pedro Moreno Mengibar is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. An IEEE Fellow and pioneer in speech technology, Pedro is currently the Chief AI Researcher at HUMAIN. Prior to his current role, he served as Chief Scientist at the Saudi National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI). Pedro previously spent over 20 years at Google, culminating in his role as Senior Research Director, where he managed a diverse team exploring ASR, TTS, and Voice Conversion for Google products. While at Google, he spearheaded rapid prototyping techniques for speech recognition in over 80 languages, enabling global voice search adoption. Earlier in his career, he developed the first commercial audio search engine (SpeechBot) at Hewlett-Packard Labs and served as a Research Scientist at Compaq Computer Corp./Digital Equipment Corp. Pedro holds a Ph.D. and a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Vince Reyes

Venture Partner

Vince Reyes is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He has over 25 years of experience in tech sales and executive leadership. Most recently, he served as Chief Revenue Officer at Level. Prior to Level, Vince was an Area Vice President at Lyft, an Area Vice President and Sales Director at Snowflake, and an Account Executive at LinkedIn. Earlier in his career, Vince spent over a decade at Oracle, advancing to Group Sales Director, and served as a Global Account Manager at EMC.

Charles Srisuwananukorn

Venture Partner

Charles Srisuwananukorn is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He is a tech industry veteran who brings his expertise in AI, ML, and software engineering. Charles is currently a founding engineer at Together.ai, a leading cloud platform for generative AI. Prior to Together, he served as Head of Applied Machine Learning at Snorkel AI and Senior Software Engineer at Apple. Charles holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford.

Jonathan Bier

Venture Partner

Jonathan Bier is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He is also Chief Investment Officer of Farside Investors, a London based investment management company specialising in global equities and cryptocurrency. Jonathan has over 13 years experience investing professionally in public equities, working for companies such as Ruffer and Brevan Howard. Jonathan also serves on the board of Brink, a charity that exists to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol and network through fundamental research and development. He has authored two books: "The Blocksize War" and "Reckless: The Story Of Cryptocurrency Interest Rates". Jonathan is a chartered accountant, having started his career at KPMG in London.

Danica Marsden

Venture Partner

Danica Marsden is a Venture Partner at Cadenza and an Executive Quantum Strategy Consultant at Enterprise Quantum, where she leverages her extensive technical expertise to help organizations prepare for the quantum future and identify high-growth opportunities in emerging technologies. Most recently, she served as the Principal Quantum Computing Scientist at the Bank of Canada, where she developed the central bank's Quantum Strategy and led research into quantum algorithms and post-quantum cryptography. Prior to this, Danica spent years advancing quantum hardware and software at companies like D-Wave Systems and Photonic Inc. She holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a BSc in Physics from the University of British Columbia.

Edward Yip

Venture Partner

Edward Yip is a Venture Partner at Cadenza. He brings over two decades of experience as a founder, investor, and operator across private equity, venture capital, and technology. Prior to Cadenza, Edward was the co-founder and GP at Lido Partners, a special situations buyout fund, and a Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, where he invested in early- and late-stage technology companies. Earlier in his career, Edward co-founded SpreeNetwork and worked as an M&A investment banker at Evercore Partners.

Jan van Eck

General Partner

Jan van Eck is a General Partner at Cadenza and serves as Chief Executive Officer of VanEck, a global investment management firm founded in 1955 that manages over $132 billion in assets as of 2026. He joined the firm in 1991 and has played a central role in its strategic evolution and expansion. In 2006, Jan founded VanEck’s ETF business, broadening the firm’s access to innovative and thematic investment exposures, and he was appointed Chief Executive Officer in 2010. Under his leadership, VanEck has focused on differentiated investment strategies across gold, emerging markets, and digital assets. Over the course of his tenure, Jan has also led major initiatives including the development of the firm’s hedge fund platform and international expansion efforts. Jan received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his B.A. in Economics from Williams College.