Daniele Molteni

Daniele Molteni served as an Associate on the investment team at Chrysalix Venture Capital from roughly September 2018 to May 2020. Chrysalix is a Vancouver-headquartered venture firm founded in 2001 by Wal van Lierop that backs early-stage cleantech and industrial-innovation companies serving resource-intensive industries. Molteni joined during the period when Chrysalix was raising and closing its ~US$120M fund (first close announced October 2018), and his role centered on sourcing, evaluating and supporting emerging technology startups in the firm's sustainability and heavy-industry focus areas.

His academic background is unusually deep for an investor: he holds a PhD in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano and an MBA from London Business School, which included an exchange term at MIT Sloan School of Management. Before venture capital, his career spanned technical and industrial organizations including Schlumberger, Nokia, and Babcock International Group, giving him firsthand exposure to the engineering-heavy sectors Chrysalix invests in.

Since May 2020, Molteni has been at Cloudflare, where his trajectory moved from Product Manager (Security) to Group Product Manager and, as of October 2024, Director of Product Management. He leads Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall (WAF) and API-protection product areas, has launched products in web/API security and AI security (e.g., "Firewall for AI"), and is a frequent author on the Cloudflare blog and a conference speaker. In practical terms, he is today a product leader rather than an active venture investor — a key caveat for anyone treating the Chrysalix contact details as current.

• Invests through Chrysalix's mandate: early-stage (Seed–Series B) companies that help resource-intensive industries decarbonize and become more efficient and competitive.
• Check sizes in the ~$2M–$15M range, with a typical initial ticket around $3M.
• Sector emphasis: CO₂ capture, smart mining, battery intelligence/energy storage, advanced materials and recycling, plus enabling software — AI, data analytics, sensors, IoT and robotics applied to industrial problems.
• What earns a "yes": defensible, technically differentiated innovation aimed at measurable efficiency/sustainability gains for large industrial end-markets, aligned with Chrysalix's stated goal of partnering "with visionary founders to build companies that help resource-intensive industries reach their efficiency, differentiation & sustainability targets."
• His own PhD-plus-industry background suggests a bias toward founders who can defend the underlying engineering and technology, not just the market narrative.