La Keisha Landrum Pierre is the Co-Founder and Managing Director at Emmeline Ventures, an early-stage VC fund, where she invests in healthcare, fintech, and sustainability solutions built by female founders. She invests in the most promising female founders across these sectors and has spent the last 13+ years building world-class operational teams, infusing strategic excellence and scalability into impact focused companies.
Prior to Emmeline Ventures, La Keisha was the Managing Director of NLA Ventures, an early-stage fund where she also invested in healthcare, sustainability, and cybersecurity. Prior to NLA Ventures, La Keisha built a career working at the intersection of tech, impact, and digital media.
As the CEO of one of Nigeria’s largest digital media start-ups, Sahara Reporters Media Group, La Keisha built and scaled the first civic media platform of its kind. With venture backing for an African company when Africa was an overlooked market, she grew the company from 2MM to 50MM monthly users, positioning it for investment by impact funds, and raising millions in funding.
She partnered with the Omidyar Network, MacArthur, Google, and Bloomberg Philanthropies to found the first-of-its-kind Civic Media Lab, Lagos with support from the MIT Center for Civic Media. There, she was the Executive Director and today sits on the board of the Civic Media Lab, Nigeria. She is also now the Chairwoman of Sahara Reporters.
La Keisha is a 2x Co-founder of Harvard Innovation Lab incubated start-ups and was a deep-tech researcher at the Youth and Media Group at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center where she studied the intersection of digital and media literacies for youth. La Keisha brings domain expertise in building and scaling impact-driven companies, taking complex business challenges, and designing solutions that create lasting financial and social change in the world.
