Cyan Banister

Cyan Banister ( Callihan; born 1977) is an American angel investor and entrepreneur. She is a partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund. She was an early investor in Uber, Niantic, Postmates, DeepMind, Carta, Thumbtack, Flexport, Affirm, and SpaceX, and co-founded Zivity, an adult-themed social networking site. Banister was the first woman investing partner at the venture capital Founders Fund, where she led seed and early-stage investments.

Early life and education Banister grew up in Arizona.

Career Banister started her career in non-executive positions at NBCUniversal, where she worked in systems administration and development support from 1999 to 2001. She was a contributing writer to TechCrunch. She worked at the security startup IronPort from 2003–2006.

A self-taught engineer, Banister held management roles at IronPort. Banister invested early in several companies worth more than a billion dollars, including Uber, Affirm, Opendoor, and Postmates. She served as editor-in-chief until March 2016, when she became the first woman partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund. At Founders Fund, Banister invested in companies like Niantic and HQ Trivia, and backed queer community app Yass through its FF Angel fund, the firm's vehicle for "inclusive and accessible" investments. She is also a co-founder of Thankroll.

Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman wrote, "Our team has known Cyan for years and we've been continually impressed by her ability to identify some of the most impactful technology companies in the world at the earliest stages."

In March, 2020, Banister announced that she was leaving Founders Fund to join Long Journey Ventures to get back into angel investing. In March 2025, Banister and her partners at Long Journey Ventures, Arielle Zuckerberg and Lee Jacobs, closed their fourth early-stage fund, Long Journey IV, raising approximately $181.8 million to back what the firm calls "magically weird" founders. Personal life and political ideology She lives with her husband Scott Banister in San Francisco. She identifies as a socially liberal libertarian, and came out in 2016 as genderqueer.

The day after Donald Trump in a presidential debate told the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of inciting violence, to "stand back and stand by," Banister tweeted that the group was misunderstood and had "a few bad apples who've claimed to be part of their org but in general not true."

In 2021, Banister had a Twitter account called "Recall Chesa Boudin" that argued the progressive District Attorney of San Francisco should be recalled. She donated $10,000 to a GoFundMe account started by Uber investor Jason Calacanis whose goal was to hire a researcher to investigate Boudin's office.

On August 23, 2021, interviewed on The Ingraham Angle by Laura Ingraham, Banister said, "More and more people are reaching out to me, wondering what it takes to own a firearm in San Francisco. And we don't have concealed carry permits, we don't have very good gun laws at all. And so we are allowed to defend our homes, but if we were to do that, if I were in a situation where I defended my home, what's going to happen to me?"

Awards and honors Cyan and Scott Banister won the Angel of the Year Crunchie award at the 2016 TechCrunch ceremonies. Jessi Hempel of Wired wrote that Banister is "an accomplished angel investor who, along with her husband, won TechCrunch's Angel of the Year award last spring for prescient bets on SpaceX, Uber, and DeepMind Technologies."