Fernando Martinelli

Bio

• From The Defiant (16-11-2020):

"I'm a mechatronics engineer. I did a Masters in Vision Processing in robotics. I also did an MBA and tried the entrepreneurial route a bit. Naturally, I started founding companies very early on, and got involved in crypto in early 2013. At first, I think, as usual, I thought that Bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme, but was lucky to realize that it was not the case in early 2013.

When Ethereum came out, I was really excited with the idea of smart contracts. Because I had always had the idea that in order to get to mass adoption, Bitcoin needed to have some stability, or some type of stablecoin, and smart contracts are perfect for enabling that to happen. That led me to get involved very early on with the MakerDAO team with whom I collaborated and met the team in person very early on. This is how I got to know Nikolai and also, Mike McDonald, who is our CTO today." 

Occupations

• Balancer; CEO and co-founder of Balancer Labs

Investments

• Element Finance; took part in their Series A raise of$32M (19-10-2021).
• Karpatkey; part of the $7M funding round (23-10-2024).
• PrimeDAO; took part in their $2M raise (9-2021).