Sofia Santos

Sofia Santos is a Partner at Faber, the Lisbon-based early-stage venture firm formerly known as Faber Ventures. Faber's team page lists her as Partner across both `#science/digital` and `#climate/ocean`, and Signal identifies her as a VC investor and Partner at Faber in Lisbon.

She joined Faber in 2013 and rose through operating and investment roles: Venture Developer from July 2013 to January 2016, Investment Manager from January 2016 to January 2019, and Partner from January 2019 onward. Before Faber, she worked in human capital consulting, including SDO Consultoria, Ray Human Capital / Odgers Berndtson Group, and Jason Associates.

Her education and training include studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford in 2018; Sifted specifically notes she studied impact investing at Oxford Saïd. Public profiles also list graduate education at the University of Lisbon in 2010 and ISCTE Business School in 2019.

At Faber, Santos invests within a firm strategy focused on deep tech at pre-seed and seed. Faber describes itself as backing founders “transforming the world with frontier technology,” with first tickets up to €2.5M and a regional focus on Southern Europe while selectively investing elsewhere in Europe.

• Faber's core thesis is early-stage deep tech: “We invest in teams transforming the world with frontier technology.”
• The firm invests from pre-seed to Series A and says it specializes in helping companies become Series A-ready, often leading rounds while partnering with European and US VCs and angels.
• Faber's applied science and digital transformation thesis covers vertical applied AI, AI governance, robotics, computational biology and chemistry, AI/data infrastructure, and novel computation.
• Faber's climate and ocean thesis is that deep tech can accelerate ocean sustainability, climate action, and decarbonization, including blue biotech, food and feed from the ocean, ocean intelligence, desalination, and ocean energy.
• Santos has been publicly associated with seed-stage medical devices and AI investing; Signal ranks her in Medical Devices (Seed) and AI (Seed).
• In iLoF's 2022 seed announcement, Santos highlighted the company's combination of photonics and AI and its potential to affect the AI-in-drug-discovery and personalized medicine markets.
• In Zymvol's 2025 seed announcement, Santos framed the deal around computational solutions for enzyme discovery and industrial resilience: “Biocatalysis presents significant challenges — enzyme discovery and engineering remain complex, costly, and time-consuming.”
• In a founder-facing 2022 session, she cited red flags including not planning beyond Portugal, building overly junior teams to save cost, and changing product direction too quickly based on one customer's view.