Maria Salamanca

Maria Salamanca is a partner at Ulu Ventures, a Palo Alto-based seed-stage venture firm. Ulu describes her as its “Champion of the consumer,” and TechCrunch reported in September 2022 that she left Unshackled Ventures after seven years to join Ulu as a partner focused on building its seed-stage consumer strategy.

Before Ulu, Salamanca was at Unshackled Ventures, an early-stage fund backing immigrant founders. She joined Unshackled in 2015, the same year it was founded, and Ulu’s profile says that during her tenure she invested in more than 75 companies and evaluated more than 8,000 deals. At Unshackled, her work centered on very early immigrant-founder investments, including founders still facing visa and network-access barriers.

Earlier in her career, Salamanca worked at FWD.us, the immigration and criminal-justice-reform organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and other technology leaders. Her own biography says she later became founding COO at Swing Left after the 2016 election and remains involved with the organization as a board member.

Salamanca was born in Bogotá, Colombia, immigrated to the United States at age seven, and was raised in Orlando, Florida. She attended UC Berkeley, studying Political Science and Legal Studies with a minor in Public Policy. In 2022 she was elected to the Orange County Public Schools board for District 2, representing the eighth-largest school district in the United States.

• Ulu focuses on seed-stage investing, including pre-seed, seed, and post-seed.
• Ulu says its three core investment criteria are “a visionary entrepreneur, a home-run market opportunity, and an attractive risk/reward tradeoff.”
• Ulu’s investing process uses decision analysis and market mapping to quantify uncertainty, identify key risk drivers, and target a 10x or greater probability-weighted cash-on-cash return.
• Salamanca’s consumer focus at Ulu builds on her stated interest in consumer, web3, next-generation platforms, gaming, and applying Ulu’s decision-analysis framework to consumer investing.
• In earlier public investor-interest listings, she identified pre-seed and seed interests in consumer, e-commerce, digital health, fintech, gaming, future of work, and femtech.
• Ulu’s team profile says she and Ulu previously co-invested through Unshackled and Ulu Fund III in Allocate, Formally, Parfait, and Syndicate.