Ekaterina, a founding partner of BlankPage Capital, is one of Europe’s most visionary venture capitalists who has been investing in breakthrough technology companies in AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, cloud and cybersecurity for almost two decades. Previously, as a General Partner at OpenOcean VC and a Managing Director at Samsung Catalyst Fund, she has led investments and served on the boards of companies such as GraphCore (acquired by SoftBank), IQM Quantum Computers, AIMotive (acquired by Stellantis), Mapillary (acquired by Meta) and many more. In addition, she was deeply involved in strategic initiatives to create $20B+ business opportunities for Samsung, EMC/Dell and Siemens. Passionate about building a strong technology ecosystem, she has invested in other deep tech Venture Capital funds across Europe.

I am an ex-banker turned startup founder turned venture capitalist, with a strong belief that the most innovative startups have the power to reinvent the way we live. I have been on the roller coaster of entrepreneurship and understand the importance of ‘just being there’ for a founder. Like the majority of my Wharton classmates, I graduated and joined finance. I started off as a banker at JP Morgan Chase before eventually starting my own company that was incubated at Y Combinator. As founder/CEO of a healthtech venture, I led workflows across product, operations, sales, fundraising and HR to try and successfully piece together the crazy puzzle of startup success. After 4 years at DocTalk, I had tasted failure in terms of scaling a business, and wanted to share my learnings of what to do and, more importantly, what not to do with aspiring entrepreneurs. I launched StartupConnect, a collaborative social organization for founders to learn from their peers. During this journey, I saw that working with driven founders on early-stage ideation and execution invigorates me and the possibility of backing founders and partnering with them in a mission-oriented manner became my calling. Since then, I have worked at Progression Fund and Accel before meeting Mattias and Mike and falling in love with their vision of building a truly tech-driven VC. My personal experiences have shown me that startups are really really hard. Thousands of data points have to line up for progress to be made. The life of a founder is not one of glamor but of grit and determination – where lows are soul-crushingly low and very frequent while the rare high is never as all-encompassing as you would like. I always add this lens to my relationships with founders. I am continuously excited by the remarkable founders working on fantastic ideas. I firmly believe that through our combination of data-driven investing and human-centric relationships, Moonfire is uniquely positioned to help early-stage founders reach their next milestone while never losing focus over the bigger long-term target. I am excited for the journey ahead and am happy to chat on how we could partner up. Dont worry, I am quite informal in how I communicate and will give you a real representation of my thoughts.