Maria first joined Madrona’s investment team in 2021 and rejoined after graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2026. She focuses on sourcing and evaluating new opportunities from Seed through Series C across Madrona’s core investment themes. She is particularly interested in AI infrastructure, agentic applications, robotics, and deep tech. She loves working with technical founders solving hard problems.

Journey to Madrona

Growing up, Maria wanted to be an artist, like her grandmother, and today she sees entrepreneurs as contemporary artists of our era. Maria majored in fine art and design during undergrad. She loves the joy of creating something new. This passion later ignited her interest in entrepreneurship and technology. Like an artist, researchers and technology entrepreneurs use elements from the past to shape the future, transforming the unimaginable into the inevitable.

She has held various investing and operating roles. Right after college, she was in the rotational management program at Gap Inc. and had the opportunity to lead a few product categories. She also spent time as a product manager at one of Madrona’s portfolio companies, Typeface AI, where she worked on the company’s first agentic video product. While at Stanford, she worked on a startup and took it from zero to one, and during that process, learned she is better suited to be an investor. That led her to spend a few months as a fundamentals public equity analyst at Lone Pine Capital, where she covered nuclear energy stocks. After each of these experiences, she concluded she is most excited about working with early-stage entrepreneurs and helping them turn their ideas into great businesses, which brought her back to Madrona.

Lessons learned

Customer obsession is one of the most important attributes of being a great founder. Building and running a business requires deep customer empathy and passion for solving your customers’ problems.

When she’s not in the office…

Maria can be found making art or staying active. She loves to paint in her free time and loves skiing and hiking. She also loves to travel and has visited more than 30 countries.

Noteworthy

Maria graduated with honors from Washington University in St. Louis with three majors in marketing, entrepreneurship, and fine art. She graduated with an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In high school, Maria was a Team USA athlete in synchronized figure skating.