Julianne Brands

Julianne Brands is a Venture Partner at Breakwater Ventures, a pre-seed and seed fund investing in founding teams across the US and Canada with a preference for the Pacific Northwest. In this role, which she has held since January 2023, she invests in preseed and seed founders using AI and software to address problems in established markets. Concurrently, she serves as Founder and CEO of Coast Labs, a financial services company she founded in 2022, and holds a role in Blockchain, Crypto, and Digital Currencies at PayPal, also from January 2023.

Prior to Breakwater Ventures, Brands co-founded a social investment app targeting millennial women, launched out of Stanford GSB, which she wound down in January 2023 after being unable to find product-market fit. Before her entrepreneurial work, she served as Director of Strategy and Chief of Staff at Sila, a fintech API platform, from 2020 to 2021. Earlier, she held roles at Oregon Venture Fund, progressing from Associate to General Partner between 2015 and 2020. Additional prior experience includes an Associate Research role at Pacific Crest Securities and a Program Coordinator position at the Milken Institute's Center for Financial Markets. She holds a Master of Science as a Sloan Fellow from Stanford University Graduate School of Business (2021–2022) and a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Political Science from Santa Clara University.