Maria Palma is a General Partner at Freestyle Capital. While she is a generalist investor, most of her recent time and investments have been in AI both at the app and infrastructure level. She loves being involved in start-ups and enjoys the challenge of creating real value and changing industries that are broken. She finds it constantly inspiring, humbling and mostly, a ton of fun.
Prior to Freestyle, she was a General Partner at Kindred Capital, a seed and early-stage venture firm focusing on European technology companies. In the past three years she has led investments in companies like Fung, Lottie and Dunia. She’s recently been spending a lot of her time in AI infrastructure and made personal angel investments in companies like Lovable, .txt and Clusterfudge. Prior to Kindred, Maria was a Principal at RRE Ventures in New York where she spent time on the investment side (investing in companies such as Ladder, Moov, Novo, Mobot, Lightning Labs and Pattern), and also built out their platform efforts. Before that, Maria was the Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Business Development for a NY-based startup, Eyeview, as they scaled from zero to $40M in revenue. Maria began her career at General Electric in Operations Management & Supply Chain. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Industrial Engineering from UW-Madison.
She is also passionate about entrepreneurship in any context and was involved with two nonprofits in this regard over the years. She served on the board of African Entrepreneur Collective, a non-profit working with entrepreneurs in Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia across urban, refugee and rural environments to drive job growth. She co-founded NYC Blend, a non-profit that helps underrepresented founders access venture capital.
She also believes in creating greater access to venture, regardless of your own inherent network. If you are a founder who would like to get in touch but doesn’t know Maria, please email her at map@freestyle.vc with the title “Founder Reachout”, a pitch deck, how much you are raising and an answer to the following prompt “From a leadership perspective, how have you developed and changed over your career to date and how do you think you will evolve in your current endeavor?” (this is not intended to be a background about you, but more specifically about your leadership style and how you’ve evolved as a professional so far).
Outside of work, Maria loves spending time with her family and traveling whenever possible.