Venture banking 3.0: How Stifel is rebuilding trust after Silicon Valley Bank
- Stifel's Katya Kohen explains how venture banking is being rebuilt into what she calls 3.0 after Silicon Valley Bank's collapse.
- She breaks down why bigger banks and neobanks each fell short of replacing SVB, and why venture debt has become essential capital for AI founders.
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, it took with it a bank that had quietly become infrastructure for the startup ecosystem, holding the majority of the venture debt market and serving as the one relationship founders and fund managers trusted for everything from a wire transfer to an introduction. Bigger banks and a wave of neobanks moved fast to fill the void. Three years later, the question is whether either one actually replaced what SVB was.
Today I’m joined by Katya Kohen, managing director at Stifel, where she leads investor coverage nationally for the firm’s venture and fund banking group. Katya’s path into banking runs through venture, not around it. She built and exited a tech company, invested as an angel in immigrant founders, built her own accelerator, and spent years at Techstars before joining Stifel as, in her words, its first non-traditional banker. That mix of operator, investor, and now banker shapes what she calls venture banking 3.0, a founder-first model built after the SVB meltdown.
We get into what actually broke in the founder-bank relationship, how Stifel has grown its venture banking book toward $12 billion in commitments, and why venture debt has become essential capital for AI companies given how capital-intensive the category has become.
Let’s get into it.
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Top-line Takeaway: Katya Kohen, managing director at Stifel, where she leads the firm’s venture and fund banking group, argues that venture banking is entering a new era after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. She explains how Stifel is building what she calls “venture banking 3.0”: combining the trusted human relationships founders still need with the digital experience they now expect, while connecting them to capital, treasury, wealth management, and investment banking as their companies grow. Kohen also makes the case for venture debt as an increasingly important tool for capital-intensive AI companies, and says the SVB failure has made founders more deliberate about who they trust with their money. For Stifel, the opportunity is to bring those pieces together into a founder-first model that supports companies from their earliest funding rounds through an eventual exit.
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Meet Katya Kohen
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