Adriana Vitagliano

Adriana leads deep tech at firstminute, investing across embodied AI, industrial tech, frontier science, and defence.

She joined from Lakestar (€1.5bn AUM, investments include Spotify, Revolut, etc.) after completing a dual degree MSc / MBA at the University of Oxford. She previously worked as an investment partner at Creator Fund, investing in deep tech and life sciences, and at Diffblue, a University of Oxford AI spinout. She started her career in M&A Advisory at PwC in NYC, where she also served as COO of the Financial Services Deals vertical (~100 employees).

She works closely with R2 Robotics (one-shot multimodal learning interface for robots), ETA (force-aware foundational model for high manipulation tasks), Minerva (hardware and software for defence), Intropy (AI-powered ERP for physical industries), Zymbly YC W26 (AI for heavy-asset maintenance workflows), Dayhoff Labs (foundational model for biochemistry), and Rectify (dark automated factories for manufacturing parts), amongst others.

Adriana holds an MBA and MSc with distinction in Global Area studies from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. with honors from Princeton University. She is an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity (ELBI) fellow with Johns Hopkins University.