Jennifer Chiarella – Valitana

Jennifer Chiarella did not set out to become a builder. Her early ambitions leaned toward criminal justice, a field she studied at Quinnipiac University before veering into business and eventually law. But somewhere along the way—through an MBA from UConn School of Business, a JD from UConn School of Law, and a series of in-house contract roles across Connecticut—she developed something more valuable than a specialty: the ability to figure things out and apply that knowledge somewhere entirely new.

Jennifer Chiarella | Valitana | Deputy General Counsel

That capacity for adaptation has defined her tenure at Valitana, a fintech company dedicated to building intuitive, integrated, and customizable platforms for modern investment professionals. Its flagship product, Valitana Analytics, a CLO analysis and workflow tool, gives clients deep access to relative-value metrics and the ability to run valuations with custom cash flow projection scenarios. The company’s other core offering, Vantage, is a multi-asset class trade and portfolio management platform equipped with extensive data warehousing capabilities, custom-built workflows, and a powerful compliance engine designed to serve operations, finance, portfolio managers, traders, and IR teams alike. Additionally, Valitana has recently launched a CMBS Analytics product and is targeting a summer launch of Vesta, software custom-built for specialty insurers. Jennifer joined the company in July 2022 as its sixth employee and first attorney on staff.

From the ground up

“When I started, I was employee No. 6,” she says. “Now we have over 50 in the company.”

What drew her to Valitana was not the industry—she had spent her entire career in aerospace, a world far removed from collateralized loan obligations and portfolio management — it was the momentum. The company was already distinguishing itself through the quality of its technology, and she recognized in that progress something worth joining. After years of working within large institutions, she was drawn to the opportunity to apply that discipline and perspective in a faster-moving environment where she could help build and influence the company in meaningful ways.

“I thought it would be cool to be a part of a growing and winning team,” she says. “We were rapidly becoming a leader in our industry due to the strength of our technology.”

That instinct proved sound. Valitana recently received the 2026 Best CLO Data and Technology Provider Innovation award at the fourth annual DealCatalyst U.S. CLO Awards—a recognition that reflects both the platform’s capabilities and the company’s pace of evolution.

Chiarella arrived with a mandate that was never narrowly defined. In addition to building the legal function from scratch—drafting processes, establishing workflows, and positioning legal as a genuine business partner rather than a reactive cost center—later her leadership capacity was expanded to include HR and Compliance. The scope of responsibility would be unusual at a larger organization, but at a company still defining its own structure, it made practical and strategic sense. She leaned into it.

Wearing many hats

Her days now span employment law, vendor contracts, evolving regulatory requirements, and employee engagement. She recently helped organize a Bring Your Child to Work Day that included making birthday cards for the safehouse children at a Domestic Violence Crisis Center (DVCC) —a moment that captured something essential about the culture she has helped build at Valitana, one in which giving back is woven into how the team operates day to day.

“HR is a really interesting space—so many risks associated with hiring and terminating people, payroll and benefits.”

That breadth of experience has also made her a more effective counselor to the business. With an MBA layered beneath her legal training, she approaches problems the way a strategist would—weighing risk not in isolation, but always in the context of what the company is trying to accomplish. Legal, in her view, earns its place by being genuinely useful: understanding the business well enough to help it move forward, not merely to slow it down when problems arise.

“We make decisions together with the CEO and CFO and key stakeholders,” she says. “We take risks, but never at the expense of our integrity.”

Scaling with intention

The next phase of that work is already underway. Valitana recently announced a strategic investment from an outside firm that recognized the company’s growth trajectory, revenue, and financial position. The partnership brings meaningful operational support—resources around HR, compliance, and legal that Chiarella expects to draw on directly as the organization continues to expand. The company’s roadmap projects roughly 85 employees by the end of 2026, and she is already thinking carefully about what that growth means for her team. She recently hired a junior attorney and has two people in HR, with additional hiring anticipated as the business scales. She is excited to continue growing with her team. Her view of leadership centers on helping others realize their potential through confidence-building, support, and the belief that people are capable of more than they realize. The complexity she manages is growing in parallel—including a widening European footprint that introduces new regulatory obligations and demands proactive navigation across multiple jurisdictions.

Her approach to all of it is shaped by a conviction she has carried across every role: that legal professionals need to be creative—not in a loose sense, but in a disciplined and deliberate one.

“People think of poets, musicians, artists, and actors as creative, but a good lawyer must be creative in balancing growth and risk,” she says.

Building people, not just processes

That belief extends beyond Valitana’s offices. Since 2020, Chiarella has taught business law as an adjunct professor at UConn, working with undergraduate students who have no plans to attend law school. She does not assign cases or ask students to memorize doctrine. Instead, she grounds every topic in the kinds of situations they are likely to encounter across any career—using real-world headlines to illustrate how legal concepts emerge in everyday professional life. The point is not expertise. It is awareness: learning to recognize an issue before it becomes a problem, regardless of what field a student eventually enters.

Her approach to teaching mirrors the way she approaches her career: discipline matters, structure has value, and growth often comes from being willing to adapt. Rather than forcing a predetermined path, she built her career by recognizing opportunity and evolving alongside it.

Chiarella was recently named to Corporate Counsel Business Journal’s (CCBJ) 2025 class of 50 Women to Watch. She carries that recognition alongside the quieter evidence of progress: a legal team built where none existed, a compliance framework designed to scale alongside a company still very much in motion, and a classroom of students who leave better prepared to navigate the legal dimensions of whatever world they step into. For someone who never set out to be a builder, the foundations she has laid speak for themselves.