SAPNA SHAH
Sapna Shah is an angel investor, retail/consumer expert and three-time entrepreneur. Through Red Giraffe, Sapna makes early-stage investments in sports, specifically in three verticals within sports: women's sports (teams/leagues), fan engagement and sports as community. She previously invested in retail and consumer startups. She has a particular focus on startups that have female and/or underrepresented founders, and invests only in US-based companies. Select investments include: Unrivaled Basketball, Break Sports, Young King Hair Care, Realworld, Silk + Sonder, Findmine, Stantt, Monica + Andy, Iterate.ai and The Renatural.
Sapna is also the founder of Retail X Series, an ecosystem for retail and consumer startups in New York and around the US, featuring webinars, a podcast, Slack community and resources for early-stage founders who are revolutionizing the future of retail. Retail X helps founders by providing content with experts giving tactical advice on topics ranging from customer acquisition to financial modeling to early-stage fundraising, targeted specifically to pre-seed and seed stage retail and consumer founders.
Sapna advises start-ups and judges in the startup competitions at the Wharton School, NYU Stern and Columbia Business School. She has also mentored at a number of New York-based accelerators including Friends of eBay, Grand Central Tech, Monarq, XRC Labs, New York Fashion Tech Lab and Trendseeder. Sapna currently serves on the Board of Directors of the NY Tech Alliance. Sapna has also served on the Board of Directors of New York Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world.
Previously, Sapna co-founded and led Retail Eye Partners, a successful independent Wall Street equity research firm. At Retail Eye, Sapna assessed the monthly and quarterly performance of major retailers in the specialty, big box and department store sectors through intensive channel checks and analysis. Sapna also co-founded and launched a menswear e-commerce retailer, Mind the Chap, and led the Marketing and Web Development areas of the company. Prior to Retail Eye Partners, Sapna was Executive Director of Strategy and Customer Insight at Linens 'n Things, Inc., responsible for customer targeting and segmentation, market and consumer research, corporate strategic planning, new business rollouts and competitive benchmarking. Prior to Linens 'n Things, Sapna was Director of Strategic Planning & New Business Development at Ann Taylor, where she worked on launching Ann Taylor’s e-commerce site, developing a color cosmetics line, visioning the store of the future and improving store operations. Sapna also has experience at Gap, Inc. Previous to her career in retail, Sapna worked in investment banking at Punk, Ziegel & Knoell and at Morgan Stanley as a credit analyst.
Sapna received her B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School as well as a B.A. in East Asian Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. She is a board member of the Women’s Forum of New York.