Melissa L. Bradley (B’89) is the founder of 1863 Ventures, a small business platform to accelerate New Majority entrepreneurs from high potential to high growth. Last year, she sold Ureeka, a small business platform company.

Bradley is on the board of Eat the Change, and a trustee of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She is a member of the Milken Institute DEI in Asset Management Initiative and Goldman Sachs’ One Million Black Women Advisory Council. She is also a member of the Small Business Administration’s Investment Capital Advisory Committee and is the former co-chair and current member of the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

In 2022, Bradley was awarded the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Alliance Excellence Award for Impact and named to the Forbes 50 Over 50.

Bradley is a Professor of the Practice at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Over the last two years, she was commended with the Entrepreneurship Faculty Excellence Award, the Joseph F. LeMoine Award for Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Excellence, the Peter W. Gonzalez, Jr. Award for Excellence in Adjunct Faculty Teaching, and The Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute.

She is married to Allessandra Bradley-Burns (SFS’90), and they have six kids.