Maria Rotilu

Founding Partner, Openseed

Maria Rotilu is the founding partner at Openseed, an early-stage fund investing in operators turned founders before launch. Prior to Openseed, for most of her over 10 year career, Maria was an operator turned investor, having scaled international technology startups to millions of users in leadership roles such as country manager of Uber Nigeria, and general manager for West Africa at Branch.co (a neo-bank that offered credit using AI/ML to credit score smartphone data).

As an investor, she was most recently a fund manager who co-led a £10M European fund investing in European founders at pre-seed across B2B software, fintech and digital health and has invested in over 50 startups across continents at pre-seed.

Maria has a bachelor’s in computer science from Covenant University, an MBA from Said Business School, University of Oxford, was the managing director of the Oxford Seed Fund. She is also a Certified Chartered Accountant, with Association of Chartered Accountant (ACCA) in the United Kingdom.

Maria personally finds backing and supporting ambitious founders early, even before day one, most impactful.