Bulbul Gupta, MPP

Bulbul Gupta is President & CEO of Pacific Community Ventures, one of the US’s first impact investing funds, and a nonprofit community development financial institution (CDFI), where she is leading a restorative capital strategy into micro and small businesses designed to build economic mobility in low-income communities, through the power of a good quality job for working families, and climate adaptation support for community resilience.

She is a mission-driven leader, with 25 years of experience shaping fund innovation, public-private partnerships, to advance inclusive entrepreneurship, economic development, and responsible technology. She started her career on and off Capitol Hill on social safety nets, spent 10 years investing in emerging market entrepreneurs, and pivoted to work on domestic wealth inequality following the US financial crisis, where she was also a small business entrepreneur before coming to PCV. Previously, Bulbul co-founded a responsible Artificial Intelligence think tank in California; led Entrepreneurship & Impact Investing at the Clinton Global Initiative; helped launch the White House’s G8 Impact Investing task force in 2013, and advised the transition of the White House Office on Technology and Innovation in 2016. She has served as an Entrepreneurship and Small Business Policy Advisor to numerous campaigns, helped start the public-private partnerships and innovative finance office under the Bush Administration.

In her time at PCV, she co-founded and helped launch the California Rebuilding Fund in 2020, the first time that 10 CDFIs have come together on a shared underwriting and lending to small businesses around the Covid-fueled economic crisis; launched PCV’s Good Jobs Innovation Lab and climate work to advance good and green jobs for economic access among micro and small business owners; and innovated PCV’s first place-based funds in Oakland through a partnerships model.

Bulbul has a Masters in Public Policy & Economics from the University of Michigan, undergraduate at George Washington University, and teaches impact investing and fund innovation at NYU and Berkeley. She is a first-generation immigrant, daughter of Indian tech entrepreneurs, and lives in the Bay Area, California.