Cheryl Beninga named 2025 Honoree for the Sacramento Inno Awards
Sacramento Inno Awards: Meet the Honorees for 2025 – Cheryl Beninga
Sacramento Business Journal
Cheryl Beninga may be best known locally these days as the co-founder in 2017 of FourthWave, an accelerator program for women entrepreneurs.
FourthWave focuses on supporting entrepreneurs to scale their companies with modules ranging from leadership and financing to corporation rules and marketing.
The current cohort of Fourth Wave is currently completing the 16-week business accelerator program, supported by The Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at California State University Sacramento, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the city of Sacramento, among others.
FourthWave alumnae from the previous cohorts have gone on to raise more than $150 million in investments and venture capital, Beninga said.
“While women are launching companies at three times the rate of men, we only attract about 2% of venture capital investments,” Beninga said. “We know that investing in women is one of the most effective ways to reduce inequality and increase economic growth. FourthWave was born to alleviate those barriers.”
Because women-led companies tend to struggle to find investors, they tend to have to be more creative, and that is an opportunity, she said. Women-led companies tend to find workarounds which makes them more resilient. And that makes them better investments, she said.
Outside of Sacramento, Beninga is the managing director of Beninga Advisors, a consulting firm for technology companies in acquiring capital and mergers and acquisitions, and she is managing partner of venture capital firm Wai Mohala Ventures, which is women-funded focuses on impact companies with diverse founders.
She was also part of the team at American River Ventures, a Roseville-based venture capital firm that managed a $100 million fund. She worked on ARV's investment into Synapsense, a Folsom startup focused on data center power management that was successfully sold in 2014 to Panduit. Synapsense still has a Folsom office.
Beninga earned a Harvard MBA and she was 14-year veteran of Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), where she was a senior investment manager for Intel Capital, the chip giant’s venture capital arm until 2006.