Courtesy of Kleida Martiro
- Kleida Martiro climbed the ranks from associate to Glasswing Ventures partner in four years.
- She's been investing in artificial intelligence startups long before the hype reached a fever pitch.
- More than half of the investing partners at Glasswing are women after Martiro's promotion.
Four years ago, before the ink had dried on her business school diploma, Kleida Martiro accepted an associate role at a brand-new venture firm in Boston. The firm, Glasswing Ventures, had just closed its first fund at $112 million to invest in artificial intelligence and security startups, and had only its two founders and an associate on the team.
"In some ways it was a startup itself," Martiro told Insider on a video call. The firm's size and newness meant that each person needed to do a bit of everything. Martiro did the typical grunt work of sourcing companies and sending pass emails to founders, but she also helped evaluate deals, fundraise for the firm, and sit on boards as an observer. It wasn't long before she made her first investment.
In four years, Martiro, 31, was promoted twice to senior associate and principal, and earlier this year, she made partner. Her promotion means the firm has seven investing partners, four of whom are women.
Martiro invests in early-stage startups that harness artificial intelligence to build solutions for the enterprise and security markets. She already observes six company boards in the Glasswing portfolio and serves as a director at Retrocausal, a computer-vision company that provides tools for the manufacturing industry.
Even as money for tech startups dries up, the hype around generative AI — or systems that can be used to create new content — has triggered a funding blitz. This has provided a rare opportunity for young investors to get in on the ground floor of a technology paradigm shift.
Though, Martiro had a leg up. She joined a small firm where she took on responsibilities above her pay grade, and she went all in on AI before the hysteria set in.
When she was 13, Martiro left her family in Albania to come to America for a better education. She had to learn English on the fly and adjust to a new life with her aunt in Seattle.
"I learned how to adapt at a young age," said Martiro.
She studied math and economics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and spent her summers hustling at early-stage startups. After undergrad, she joined the startup SocialFlow, which helped media outlets know when to share articles to maximize clicks, in a data science role. On the side, she taught herself to code in online courses.
SocialFlow, which was acquired last year, had been backed by a legacy Boston venture firm, Fairhaven Capital Partners. That's how Martiro came to know Rudina Seseri and Rick Grinnell, partners who would later leave the firm to raise their own fund focused on AI. They named it Glasswing after the butterfly, a symbol of transformation.
Martiro kept in touch with the pair after she left SocialFlow to get her master's at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In 2019, Glasswing gave Martiro her first role in venture.
Grinnell said Martiro's "unrelenting drive to stay on the cutting edge" has made her a domain expert on generative AI and large language models. "As a result, she has become one of the most recognized VCs focused on AI," he said in a statement. Last year, Insider named Martiro one of the 41 most important venture capitalists in the Boston area.
In March of 2022, Martiro led her first deal with a $3.4 million round for Retrocausal, the startup using software and cameras to help factories improve quality assurance.
After the first few calls with the founders, Martiro said she arranged for them to meet chief technology officers and sales gurus in Glasswing's advisory panel. This group got in the weeds to review the startup on behalf of Glasswing, but it also helped the founders to generate sales leads, identify an independent director for the board, and shape a go-to-market strategy. And so when the founders got handed multiple term sheets, they picked Glasswing and Martiro because they had already put in the elbow grease.
"Most of the time this is why Glasswing wins," Martiro said. "We're jumping in to help."