About Me

Sapna Shah

Through Red Giraffe, I make early-stage investments in sports. Specifically, I’m focused on three verticals within sports: women’s sports (teams/leagues), fan engagement and sports as community. I primarily focus on companies that have female and/or underrepresented founders, and I invest only in US-based companies.

To get in touch, or to submit a pitch deck, please send an email to info@redgiraffeadvisors.com.

Bio

Sapna Shah is an angel investor, retail/consumer expert and three-time entrepreneur. Through Red Giraffe, she now makes early-stage investments in sports, and has previously invested in startups in the retail and consumer sectors. She has a particular focus on startups that have female and/or underrepresented founders, and invests only in US-based companies. Select investments include: 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 startups in New York and around the US, featuring events/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 given tactical advice on topics ranging from customer acquisition to financial modeling to early stage fundraising, targeted specifically to preseed and seed stage founders.

Sapna is an advisor member of The North, a platform that allows founders to book advisory and feedback sessions with experts. She also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the NY Tech Alliance. She has previously served on the Board of Directors of New York Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world.

Prior to Red Giraffe Advisors, Sapna co-founded and led Retail Eye Partners, a successful independent Wall Street equity research firm for eight years. 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. Simultaneously, in 2012, Sapna co-founded a menswear e-commerce retailer, Mind the Chap, and led the Marketing and Web Development areas of the company. She also has over eight years of experience working for retailers in the specialty apparel and home furnishings sectors. Prior to the founding of Retail Eye Partners, Sapna was Executive Director of Strategy and Customer Insight at Linens ‘n Things, Inc. In this capacity, she was 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.

Startup Board Roles

Board Observer of Stantt (2017-present)

Advisory Board Member of TresseNoire (2017-2020)

Advisory Board Member of VisuWall (2018-2023)

Advisory Board Member of Findmine (2015-present)

Board Member of Modalyst (2015-2019)

Affiliations

Board of Directors – NY Tech Alliance (2019-present)

Board of Directors – New York Angels (2016-2017)

Board of Directors – Women’s Forum of New York (2022-present)

Judging/Coaching

Entrepreneurial Sounding Board Practitioner – Columbia Business School (2014-2016)