Adriana Saman

Adriana Saman is a fintech investor at Clocktower Technology Ventures, the technology-investing affiliate of Clocktower Group, a Santa Monica–based global macro investment firm. She joined the venture team and rose through the ranks — appearing across sources as Associate, Principal, Director, and most recently Managing Director — where her work centers on deal sourcing, diligence, and execution. Clocktower Technology Ventures launched in 2015 to partner with entrepreneurs reinventing financial services, investing "from the earliest seeds of startup life to businesses scaling for growth," and has become one of the more active venture backers of the Latin American fintech ecosystem.

Before Clocktower, Saman spent her early career at J.P. Morgan, first as a Strategy Associate on Chase's Digital Payments team — where she worked across consumer-facing payment products and product roadmaps — and then as an Investment Banking Analyst focused on M&A transactions across Latin America. That combination of payments-product strategy and cross-border LatAm dealmaking underpins her investment focus today.

Originally from Ecuador, Saman holds a BA in Political Science (Cum Laude) from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been recognized on LAVCA's (the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America) annual list of Top Women Investors in Latin America, and is a frequent podcast guest and conference speaker on fintech and financial inclusion.

• Core belief: "Fintech equates to financial inclusion in Latin America" — she frames financial technology as "a fundamental way to empower progress," noting that "access to financial services has always felt to me like more of a luxury than a right for most of the population."
• Stage & checks: Concentrates on seed and Series A rounds, typically writing checks in the ~$100K–$1M range (median around $625K), with the fund able to follow on into growth stages.
• Where she leans in: Latin American fintech — payments infrastructure, credit/lending for consumers and SMBs, and the digitization of money in underbanked markets. She calls real-time payments in emerging markets the "number one underrated innovation," singling out Mexico and Brazil as key growth areas.
• Approach to markets: Emphasizes "building out infrastructure and supporting localized payment types" and cross-border knowledge transfer — Clocktower positions itself as a "connector agent across ecosystems," bringing US/European fintech playbooks (the firm cites ~96+ fintech investments) to local founders.
• Style: Reported to favor an unusually founder-centric, non-controlling posture — generally participating rather than leading rounds or taking board control.