Annamaria Desalva

AnnaMaria DeSalva is a corporate communications leader, agency chief executive, and public-company board director with a roughly three-decade career across Fortune 100 corporations and global consultancies. She graduated from William & Mary (Class of 1990) and was appointed to the university's Board of Visitors in 2022. Early in her communications career she led the healthcare practice at Hill & Knowlton.

In the corporate world, she spent about five years as a Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Pfizer, where she was initially dedicated to integrating the ~$68 billion acquisition of Wyeth and served on R&D leadership and portfolio-strategy bodies. She then became Global Chief Communications Officer of DuPont — the role reflected in the stub title — where she restructured the communications function and steered the company through an activist proxy contest, a CEO transition, and the ~$130 billion "merger of equals" with Dow that ultimately created three independent public companies. She subsequently advised DowDuPont CEO Ed Breen on the separation and launch of the new companies.

In May 2019 she was named Chairman and CEO of Hill & Knowlton, succeeding Jack Martin, and led the firm until July 2024, when she became a principal architect of the merger of Hill & Knowlton and BCW that formed Burson, one of the world's largest communications and reputation-advisory groups. She served as Burson's Global Chairman and sat on the executive committee of parent WPP plc. She stepped down from Burson effective June 30, 2025, announcing her exit via LinkedIn; the agency confirmed the chairman role would not be refilled.

She has been an active public-company and institutional board member: Vice Chairman of XPO Logistics (Fortune 200), where she chaired the Nominating, Governance & Sustainability Committee and helped design the governance architecture for the breakup that produced GXO and RXO; an inaugural board member of RXO; a member of the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory (UChicago Argonne LLC); and a member of The Conference Board's CEO Center. She is now Principal of Invenīre 2050 LLC.

• No publicly stated angel/seed investment thesis, target check size, or written investment criteria could be found.
• Her professional "thesis" is in reputation and governance: she is described as operating "at the intersection of innovation, enterprise risk, and global complexity," advising organizations through transformative periods (mergers, CEO transitions, activist situations, restructurings).
• Invenīre 2050 LLC presents as a strategic-advisory and governance practice rather than a documented venture fund.
• Where she adds value to companies is in corporate affairs, crisis/reputation strategy, board governance, M&A integration, and CEO/board advisory — not, per available sources, in primary seed capital.