Elena Marchetti
Solo General Partner, Vector North Capital
Backs technical founders building the physical infrastructure that defense and industrial supply chains still run on manually.
Elena spent nine years in avionics procurement before she ever wrote a check, and it shows in how she picks. She looks for companies where the buyer is a government agency or a tier-one industrial supplier, because those contracts are slow to win and almost impossible to lose once won. Her argument is that most investors read that slowness as a red flag when it is actually the moat. She writes first checks into pre-seed and seed rounds, usually leading, and she is unusually comfortable with an eighteen-month sales cycle if the founding team has sold into that buyer before. The thing she screens hardest for is whether the founders have personally sat through a procurement review. She has said publicly that she can teach a team to fundraise but cannot teach them what a contracting officer cares about.
Not investing in
Consumer apps, anything requiring a large paid acquisition budget, and companies whose first customer is another venture-backed startup.
- Check size
- $150k–600k
- Stage
- Pre-seed, Seed
- Sectors
- Defense and aerospace, Deep tech and frontier
- Geography
- North America
- Fund size
- $22,000,000
New profiles every week, plus who just opened a fund.
One email. No pitch decks, no forwarding.