Victoria Li Built a Lifelong Record for Every Learner

Victoria Li is the founder and CEO of Kajaa, a student-owned educational passport that holds a child's whole development in one continuous place, from a preschool painting to a first promotion. It captures the skills, interests, creative work, and real-world strengths that never reach a report card, then helps a child discover careers and opportunities they might otherwise never see. A member of the Entreprenista League, Victoria built all of it solo and bootstrapped, through what she calls the most turbulent stretch of her life. The platform is now live with early users across five regions.

"Kajaa doesn't change what students learn. It changes what learning unlocks," Victoria says.

Here is how two decades of building inside other people's companies became the first thing that was fully her own.

The problem she lived twice

Victoria grew up with working-class parents who had a clear plan for her: become a doctor, go into finance, or become a lawyer. Beyond that, she was left to figure most of it out alone. Switching curricula between countries meant starting over each time, applying to new programs with little exposure to the careers that might have matched her strengths.

The pattern repeated a generation later. Her daughter was born in France, and the family relocated to the Middle East, where Victoria had hoped to continue her own career and was told her profile made opportunities limited. She was not willing to settle into being called a trailing wife. At the same time, she watched her daughter's identity start to slip between report cards, school transitions, and standardized evaluations. So she built Kajaa from every pain point she had lived, first as a student crossing borders and now as a mother.

Twenty years of doing the founder's job

Before Kajaa, Victoria spent two decades as an investor and operator across private equity, real estate, and institutional finance, with roles at J.P. Morgan, HSBC, Polaris Pacific, and most recently as senior vice president at Round Hill Capital in London. Often she was the only woman in the room.

The pattern held everywhere she went. She would be hired for one defined role and quickly trusted with three at once: strategy, sales, marketing, and operations. The seed was planted earlier than any of it, by a grandfather who built a business from scratch that supported four generations at the same time.

"I was an entrepreneur long before I had a company," she says. "Kajaa is simply the first time the vision, and the risk, were entirely mine."

What she built alone

The accomplishment Victoria names first is that Kajaa exists at all. Behind the early users sits a real product: a full architecture with multiple user roles, a directory of institutions, a design built to connect with the learning management systems schools already run, and compliance built in from the start. She went from idea to a live platform across five regions in well under a year, entirely on her own.

What she celebrates most is quieter. Watching the first families and educators actually use what she built is the win that matters to her.

"I did not let circumstance decide what my daughter, or any child, would have access to," she says.

Who Kajaa is built for

Victoria frames it plainly: we do not have a talent shortage, we have a talent visibility problem. At the center of Kajaa is the student, with the family beside them, and that student can be any kind of learner, in traditional school, homeschooled, or on a non-traditional path, joining at any age and stage. Because the record is student-owned, it always belongs to the child, with parents acting as co-pilots.

The other side of the mission is the wider world that discovers students: schools and institutions, homeschool networks, enrichment providers, grant and scholarship programs, and employers. They connect through Kajaa's Launchpad, where a visible record turns into real access.

Building as a mother, on two clocks

Victoria runs on two time zones, founder by night and present mother by day, and she stopped trying to keep the two lives separate. Her daughter knows the rhythm: after the after-school routine, dinner, and bedtime, the work calls begin. Bringing her daughter into the journey rather than hiding it, Victoria says, has made her both a better founder and a more present mother.

Her advice for women weighing the leap comes straight from that experience. "Start before you feel ready. Lead with your lived experience, because the thing that makes you different is your advantage, not your liability." She adds the part that carried her through the lonely stretches. "If your mission is bigger than your fear, you will keep ploughing through."

Her five-year vision is global and unapologetic: students and programs on every continent using Kajaa to open real opportunities, from university to the trades to the creative path to entrepreneurship, all with equal standing. You can follow Victoria on LinkedIn and learn more about the platform at kajaa.com.

If Victoria's approach to making every learner's potential visible resonates, the Entreprenista League is a community of women founders who value connection, shared experience, and practical business insight as they grow. Learn more about the Entreprenista League right here.