Maria Rotilu

Managing Director, Oxford Seed Fund | Oxford MBA Student, Saïd Business School

Maria Rotilu is an MBA Student at the University of Oxford and is also the Managing Director of the Oxford Seed Fund, a student-led VC fund that invests £50k in 2 Oxford-Affiliated Startups every year.

Before the MBA, Maria’s 10-year professional experience spans Management Consulting and Scaling startups in Sub-Saharan Africa. After 3 years of management consulting at Deloitte, she transitioned into helping technology startups scale and did this position at Uber as the Country Manager and also as General Manager, West Africa at Branch.co.

Branch is a fintech startup that uses Machine Learning to credit-score smartphone data and offer world-class financial services via mobile phones. Branch operates in four countries across three continents. Under Maria’s leadership she grew the business from start to scale, from a team of 3 to 40, and from a $50k in disbursements to over $100m. She led the local fundraising of an unsecured commercial paper of $10m, and was responsible for leading operations across Operations, Finance, Compliance, Marketing in the region.

Maria has scaled technology businesses and teams and loves to help entrepreneurs thrive either through investments, and or strategic & operational support. She also is an Eni-Oxford Africa Scholar and has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Covenant University. She is also a Chartered Accountant with ACCA in the United Kingdom.