Who Is Jenny Flores?
Jenny Flores is the co-founder and CEO of AMH Catalyst Center, a nonprofit venture platform transforming how women entrepreneurs access capital. Born in El Salvador and raised in San Francisco, Jenny has spent over two decades navigating government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors to create opportunities for under-resourced entrepreneurs. Today, she channels that experience into reimagining venture capital, combining technology, equity, and mentorship to open doors for women founders and reshape the financial ecosystem.
Growing Up Between Two Worlds
At just two and a half years old, Jenny Flores and her family left El Salvador for San Francisco, stepping into a world that was both unfamiliar and challenging. For many immigrant families, the transition is steep, but for Jenny, it also became the foundation for a lifetime of resilience and adaptability. Her family faced financial hardships, language barriers, and the complex pressures of assimilating into a new culture.
“Growing up labeled ‘at risk’ taught me not to accept the limits others set for me,” Jenny reflects. “It built my resilience and self-trust.”
From an early age, she became a translator for her mother and their community, navigating bureaucracies, translating forms, and bridging two very different worlds. Those experiences were more than survival skills; they were early lessons in leadership and advocacy. Jenny learned how systems could either constrain or empower people, and she became determined to understand and navigate them.
School, she recalls, was both a challenge and a proving ground. Mastering a new language while helping her peers and family communicate taught her patience and persistence. Her dual fluency in English and Spanish would later become a professional asset, but more importantly, it shaped her empathy. She saw firsthand how opportunity is rarely evenly distributed and how systemic barriers often hold back talented individuals.
Even as a child, Jenny sensed a personal responsibility to create pathways where none existed. That drive carried her into early leadership roles and informed her career choices later.
A Career Built on Purpose
Jenny’s professional journey is remarkable in its breadth. She has worked across government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors for over twenty years, always with the same goal: mobilizing resources and creating opportunity for those who are underserved. Her experience spans roles in public policy, community development, corporate social responsibility, and philanthropy.
Her tenure at Wells Fargo is particularly notable. There, she co-designed the $420 million Open for Business Fund, which supported over 336,000 small businesses nationwide. Her leadership at Bank of the West/ BNP Paribas also helped direct $1B in climate finance, aligning institutional capital with long-term sustainability and resilience goals, and she helped launch numerous other investment vehicles aimed at increasing access to capital for historically overlooked entrepreneurs. Jenny’s work has always focused on systems-level change: not just supporting individual businesses, but redesigning how capital flows and how value is defined in the economy.
Yet despite her success in a stable corporate environment, the call to build something new, something that aligned fully with her purpose, became irresistible. It was a leap into the unknown, leaving a secure career to pursue a vision she had nurtured for years.
“Realizing that we have the power to create what we want to see in the world was a turning point for me,” Jenny says. “You can’t wait for someone to build what you want, if you really want it to exist, you must move to build it.”
The Leap Into AMH Catalyst Center
In 2024, Jenny co-founded the AMH Catalyst Center, a nonprofit venture platform designed to transform how women entrepreneurs access capital. Inspired by her daughter Angie, who started her own business during the pandemic, Jenny set out to create a system that would help women founders thrive while reshaping the broader venture ecosystem.
AMH Catalyst Center is more than a funding platform. It is a reimagining of venture capital itself, using technology, AI and blockchain, to provide transparency, guidance, and tailored support for women-led businesses. It challenges traditional structures that have long favored male-led ventures and seeks to redefine how investors assess risk and opportunity.
“I’m motivated by the reality that women founders aren’t failing the system, the system is failing them,” Jenny says.
Through AMH, she is mobilizing capital and expertise in ways that empower women founders, helping them navigate a system that was never designed for them. At the same time, she is reshaping investor practices, creating a ripple effect that elevates the entire ecosystem.
Jenny emphasizes that impact is both personal and systemic.
“I’m most proud of creating pathways that will open doors for thousands of women long after my work is done,” she says.
The programs she builds do more than provide funding, they foster mentorship, build community, and cultivate leadership skills that last a lifetime.
Lessons From a Life of Bridges
Throughout her career, Jenny has focused on what she calls “bridge work”: connecting people, ideas, and capital in ways that unlock growth and expand opportunity. From translating for her mother as a child to structuring large-scale investment vehicles and leading cross-sector initiatives, her work blends empathy with strategic execution. The through-line has remained constant: helping others reach their potential while reshaping the systems that limit them.
Her approach combines courage with clarity. She describes it as a process of stepping forward, even when the path is uncertain, and trusting that the way will appear.
“I’ve learned that clarity follows courage,” she says. “If you take the step, the path will rise to meet you.”
This philosophy informs her leadership at AMH Catalyst Center, where bold, innovative thinking is paired with grounded, practical execution.
Mentorship has been another cornerstone of her journey. One of her earliest role models, Virginia Apodaca, whom she met in middle school, exemplified the balance between purpose and success. “She was the first woman I ever saw in a senior executive role, and she opened doors I didn’t even know existed,” Jenny recalls. The guidance, integrity, and belief she received from mentors like Apodaca continue to shape how she leads and supports others today.
Transforming Venture Capital for Women
AMH Catalyst Center combines technology, capital, and mentorship to support women-led businesses at scale. By leveraging AI, the center tailors advisory services to the unique challenges women founders face. Blockchain technology enhances transparency in investment flows, allowing founders to see and understand how decisions are made.
Beyond technology, the AMH Impact Fund is actively preparing to invest in women-led climate innovation ventures, reinforcing Jenny’s belief that women’s leadership is essential to the economy and society’s future. These initiatives demonstrate that AMH is not simply helping individual businesses, it is creating a national model for a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable venture ecosystem.
Jenny’s work is rooted in a long-term, systems-level view of impact. She measures success not by short-term outcomes, but by whether the structures she helps build continue to expand opportunity over time. “I define success as doing work that aligns with my purpose while creating tangible pathways for others,” she says. In practice, this means designing strategies, capital vehicles, and programs that keep opening doors for women founders long after any single initiative, or leader, steps aside
A Vision Rooted in Family, Community, and Purpose
Jenny’s personal life and professional mission are deeply intertwined. Her daughter Angie’s early entrepreneurial spirit inspired AMH Catalyst Center, and her family continues to motivate her every day. Faith, community, and relationships are central to her ability to maintain balance while pursuing ambitious goals.
Her leadership philosophy is grounded in three core values: integrity, courage, and equity. Jenny believes in speaking the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, taking bold steps toward purpose, and designing systems that recognize the brilliance of those who have been historically overlooked. Joy and collaboration are equally important, she understands that meaningful change is built and sustained through human connections.
Looking forward, Jenny envisions a future where women founders are no longer the exception but the engine of the economy. The systems she is building through AMH Catalyst Center and the AMH Impact Fund aim to combine AI, data, and community to open doors at scale while leveraging blockchain to make capital flows more transparent. It’s a future where opportunity meets potential, and talent is recognized without bias.
Closing Reflections
Jenny Flores’ journey is a testament to the power of courage and the importance of creating systems that outlast any individual. From immigrant child to corporate leader to founder reshaping venture capital, her story underscores the value of resilience, vision, and purpose-driven action.
“So much of the world is designed to tell you who you’re allowed to become,” she says. “Real courage is choosing to trust your intuition and follow your heart before the path is clear, before permission is given. When your work is grounded in purpose, the answers tend to meet you along the way.”
For Jenny, success is not just what she accomplishes, it is what she enables for others. Through AMH Catalyst Center, she is creating lasting pathways for women founders, expanding access to opportunity, and reshaping the rules of venture capital for generations to come. In her work, courage leads to clarity, and clarity leads to transformation.
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