Home – Mona DeFrawi

Visionary Founder Advisor Speaker Creator Producer Humanitarian

Capital Markets Catalyst

For more than three decades, Mona DeFrawi has driven billions in startup capital formation and helped reshape the private markets. Today, she is focused on expanding early-stage and IPO funding by reintegrating individual investors into the engine of innovation and wealth creation.

Today’s broken capital markets are starving innovation and economic growth, while concentrating wealth at the top. Now, 99% of startups seeking venture capital fail to raise funding, only one percent of those funded will IPO, and a persistent liquidity crunch limits reinvestment and exit pathways. At the same time, everyday investors have been largely excluded from early-stage wealth creation for nearly three decades, fueling a wealth divide that has given the U.S. with the highest income inequality of the G7 nations.

Mona’s accomplishments include:

Founding four companies as CEO over the past 25 years, including the first private market platform to restore liquidity (now part of Nasdaq Private Market)
Managing four tech IPOs over 10 years – building Investor Relations, Communications, and Corporate Development functions from the ground up
Raising CapGen Financial’s $500M debut private equity fund in seven months
Authoring and lobbying legislation that delivered billions in new VC funding
Creating Johns Hopkins’ first entrepreneurship curriculum, supporting the founding of the Carey Business School

Mona has been telling startup stories her whole career. Now, Radivision’s Startup Media Platform enables this at scale, delivering critical missing infrastructure that resolves today’s funding, liquidity, and wealth divide crises – and connects everyday investors to the innovation economy. Radivision’s IR platform + Investor Referral Engine increase success for all capital market participants.

From childhood war refugee to Forbes “Most Powerful Women in Technology,” and “Top 100 Women in Fintech,” Mona’s career embodies what is possible when access, innovation, and value creation align. Mona is passionate speaker on the future of capital markets, IPO and public market restoration, democratizing private investing, high-performance development, and what it takes to build companies and movements that drive prosperity and lasting impact

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The New VC & IR

A new private and IPO investing movement is taking shape – one that will reopen wealth creation to everyday Americans and restore funding to the innovators today’s market has left behind. Mona DeFrawi and Radivision are at the heart of it.

The capital markets are broken. Over nearly thirty years, venture capital (VC), private equity, and investment banking appetites have skewed the markets steeply to mega-deals and the largest institutional investors – leaving 99.95% of startups seeking capital unfunded. Retail investors, who once held 50% of early-stage shareholder bases when IPOs took three to five years, are now disenfranchised – that path today stretches to fourteen years or never happens at all. Only 1% of venture-backed companies ever reach the public markets.

These trends have collapsed the number of US public companies from 8,000 to 4,000, with nearly 30% of total US stock market capitalization now concentrated in just ten companies. The VC and PE industries, and their LP investors, have been stuck in a severe liquidity crisis since 2022.

Change is inevitable, now led by White House, Congressional, and SEC regulations that unlock $12T+ of new retail investment – far outweighing the $1.5T of cumulative VC funding to date. This movement of retail capital into private and IPO investments is the new venture capital.

Mona DeFrawi and Radivision are building the infrastructure to reach millions of new investors – the new investor relations (IR) leveraging technology and content to connect mass consumer audiences with education, transparency, broad visibility, and integrity.

Founders gain funding today’s market denies them. Everyday Americans regain access to the wealth they lost when companies stopped going public. And by bringing the public in earlier, the new IR will smooth the path to IPOs and grow successful listings.