General Partner
Dafina, who joined USVP in 2012, is a general partner investing in emerging technologies in the enterprise space with a focus on Enterprise SaaS applications and security. She led investments in and joined the board of several early-stage software companies. She is currently on the boards of Arkose Labs, Carrot Fertility, Luma Health, Nfinite, Percepto, Raken, Surgical Safety Technologies, Zero Networks and others. Dafina served on the board of Prevoty, a leader in application security, who was acquired by Imperva where USVP was the lead investor and largest shareholder.
Dafina joined USVP from Tugboat Ventures, where she was a principal investor since 2010. Prior to Tugboat, she spent two years at Venrock, where she helped expand the firm’s investments in the areas of SaaS, virtualization, security, infrastructure and enterprise applications. While at Venrock, Dafina led the first institutional investment round in Cloudflare (NYSE: NET). Some of her other investments from that time include Aria Systems, Matrixx Software, and Kenna Security.
Before becoming a venture capitalist, Dafina held positions in development and product management at Microsoft, where she focused on authentication systems, digital signatures and business workflow. She worked on MSN Live ID and MS Office, and co-authored several key patents. She earned an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science, magna cum laude, with special focus on cryptography, efficient algorithms and database systems from Harvard University.