About KJ
Bio
KJ Erickson is a serial entrepreneur who is currently the CEO and Managing Partner at Arising Ventures, a holding company that buys, incubates and operates high-margin technology companies with a focus on venture turnarounds, recapitalizations, and special situations. With a current portfolio spanning enterprise SAAS, marketplaces, and fintech, KJ focuses on deal discovery and structuring, talent placement, CEO support, and aligning the family of businesses with the values and vision that drive her.
A founder since dropping out of college at age 20, KJ has sat in the CEO seat across a variety of industries. She has raised tens of millions of dollars, both traditionally from the world’s top VCs including and nontraditionally via crowdfunding. In 2021, she set the record for largest reg CF campaign to date led by a female CEO. She has also raised millions in philanthropic capital, her first venture being a refugee relief organization that served 70,000 refugees a year in central Africa.
KJ is a graduate of Y Combinator, where she was accepted as one of only a handful of solo female nontechnical founders in their history. She received her bachelors in Public Policy from Stanford University, and her MBA from Oxford which she attended on the Skoll Scholarship for Social Entrepreneurship. She believes her bio makes her sound a lot more aggressive than she really is — mostly she just loves being on her snowboard in Utah or on her bike in the southwestern desert.