Introducing the 2025 Also Capital Summer Scouts
Round 2!
Last year, I posted an intern position on LinkedIn that generated an amazing response. That posting evolved into last year’s inaugural Summer Scout Program. The 2024 team was an amazing success. The scout team made four (unannounced) investments, which have raised follow-on or co-invest capital from firms like BoostVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Greylock.
We’re back with round two this summer. As a quick refresher, throughout the course of 12 weeks, selected scouts will be given the opportunity to invest $20-25k checks in early stage startups. Scouts are given full autonomy over deal sourcing, diligence, pipeline management, portfolio construction, investment committee presentations, and “LP” reporting, with close mentorship from me. All scouts are compensated with a cash stipend for the summer, and carry participation on the investment pool.
I’m excited to share more on the three incredible people that will be joining the scout fund this summer. Reach out to them directly to chat about what you’re building!
Sai Mattapalli, Managing Partner
A desire to work on interesting and challenging things was instilled in Sai from a very young age. It’s this same desire that led him to work on sending a liquid-fueled model rocket to the Karman Line, building a humanoid robot with a dynamic gait, and conducting neuroscience research at Harvard and Georgetown before co-founding a brain health startup at 16. After raising $1.3M at a seed round valuation of $12.5M, he and his team at Vytal worked on leveraging gaze tracking to calculate ocular biometrics like saccadic latency that can be interpreted as a quantitative proxy for cognitive health.
When not working on something startups related, Sai occasionally goes to class as a CS and Economics student at Vanderbilt and takes part in side projects that hold some component of technical innovation. This past winter, he worked with a group of friends on the United Nation’s first AI film which he presented live at the COP16 conference in Saudi Arabia.
Sai was an Also Capital scout last summer and made investments in varied fields such as biotech innovation, raw materials recycling, livestock-tech, and DevOps. This summer, he hopes to continue meeting and investing in outlier founders.
Brandes Woodall, Partner
Brandes got her first taste of business at neighborhood lemonade stands, where her dad introduced her to cap tables by trading varying levels of equity in exchange for lemons or a ride to the grocery store. Since then, she’s been drawn to how companies grow—from the early scrappy decisions to the inflection points that define their trajectory. She’s especially interested in hard tech startups tackling aerospace, energy, defense, and manufacturing—industries that are core to everyday life and often overlooked by investors chasing hype cycles. She gravitates toward sectors with real-world impact, where technical depth meets commercial strategy, and where green fields and blue oceans still exist for those willing to do the work.
After graduating from Columbia with a degree in Statistics and Economics, she joined AlphaSights’ investment research unit, where she worked with leading institutional investors. There, she realized her favorite projects were founder-led and frontier-oriented—ones that required digging into how things had been built before and how they might be built differently in the future. Previously, she interned at Satori Capital, supporting both their evergreen private equity fund and a thematic hedge fund focused on the energy transition. Outside of work, Brandes is an avid skier and tennis player and spent three summers in the Kanyama district of Lusaka, Zambia, working with students on English literacy and academic support.
Esha Cyril, Partner
Esha Cyril, a public health and economics major at Johns Hopkins, came in premed shaped by moments through family cancer diagnoses, time working at a free clinic for the uninsured, and helping an Uber driver navigate his wife’s stroke. Raised in Silicon Valley by a fashion designer mom and tech founder dad, she tagged along to textile factories, named scarf designs, and knew the DHL drivers and programmers in her parents’ orbit by name. Founders, to her, were never headlines but people juggling school runs and supplier calls, breaking down at the kitchen table, then waking up to keep building. That mindset—and a little delusion—became her blueprint, showing her that adaptability and people-first problem solving are what healthcare needs to tackle its hardest challenges.
Her research on rare disease drug development exposed her to the gap between scientific breakthroughs and patient access. Esha has since worked alongside founders solving just that are supporting clinical trials at a Series B immuno-oncology company, leading GTM at a Series A digital health startup tackling substance abuse, and sourcing early health tech deals at Soma Capital. At JHU Technology Ventures, she mentors lab spinouts advancing hard technologies from noninvasive intracranial pressure measurement to new cell therapy models, each driven by technical ingenuity and persistence. She believes health tech and deep biology are uniquely hard, real lives, long timelines, and complex systems. But now, decades of research, clinical insight, and regulatory momentum are converging, creating perfect conditions for outlier founders bold enough to not just run through walls but rebuild them. When not backing these founders, Esha is on the court playing racquetball, where she has represented Team USA, earned 15 national medals, and four international titles with her doubles partner, who also happens to be her twin sister.
