Emilio Baeza

Emilio Ontiveros Baeza was born on 9 July 1948 in Ciudad Real, Spain, and died on 1 August 2022 in Madrid at age 74. He earned a doctorate in Economic Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in 1978, with a thesis on the Eurocurrency market that won the Caja de Ahorros de Madrid prize. Before academia he spent more than seven years working in national industrial companies, then built a distinguished academic career, holding the Chair of Business Economics (Economía de la Empresa) at UAM — where he also served as Vice-Rector from 1982 to 1986 — and later becoming Professor Emeritus. He held visiting appointments including a fellowship at Harvard's Real Colegio Complutense (2005) and a visiting scholar role at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

In 1987 Ontiveros co-founded Analistas Financieros Internacionales (Afi), a group of academics that grew into a leading independent Spanish advisory, consulting and training firm in economics, finance and technology (today more than 200 professionals and over twenty partners). He served as Afi's president until his death. Afi later established Afi Corporate Venturing S.L. to channel the group's holdings in innovative companies, and an early-stage vehicle branded AFI Ventures focused on pre-seed and seed, impact-driven startups — the activities most likely behind the "seed/angel" classification attached to this profile.

Beyond consulting, Ontiveros was one of Spain's most prominent public economists and communicators. He directed *Revista Economistas* (Colegio de Economistas de Madrid) from its founding in 1983 until December 2011, directed *El País*'s Economics and Finance Yearbook, and was a long-standing columnist for *El País*. He authored numerous books, including *Economía de los datos: riqueza 4.0* (2018) and *Excesos: Amenazas a la prosperidad global* (2019), and sat on the boards of companies such as Mutua Madrileña, Iberdrola and Torreal. In August 2022, Spain's Council of Ministers posthumously awarded him the Gran Cruz de la Orden del Mérito Civil.

• Primary institutional focus was economic, financial and technology advisory through Afi, not a personal angel portfolio; any early-stage investing ran through Afi Corporate Venturing S.L. / AFI Ventures.
• AFI Ventures is positioned as a pre-seed and seed vehicle backing impact-driven companies, consistent with Ontiveros's long-running intellectual focus on the digital and data economy ("Economía de los datos") and fintech.
• Sector interests aligned with his writing and Afi's practice: finance/fintech, technology, digitalization, and the data economy, applied to Spanish and Ibero-American markets.
• His own stated orientation toward economics was analytical and grounded rather than speculative — in his words, he studied economics "because I wanted to understand human behavior from a historicist point of view," and colleagues described him as "neither a futurologist nor a passadologist," basing analysis on real-world observation.