People
Andrew Padilla
Leads direct investments backing founders building frontier technologies, while serving across Aldea's investment committee and fund platform. Andrew focuses on technically complex, founder-led businesses scaling from early conviction to global impact. He brings a founder-first perspective shaped by operating, investing, and building across both the U.S. and Europe. Before Aldea, Andrew was a Partner at Alumni Ventures, where he made more than 50 investments and worked through a period of significant scale as the firm grew from approximately $500 million to $1.5 billion in assets under management. Earlier, he was an investor at Mithril Capital—founded by Peter Thiel—and at GCM Grosvenor, where he helped manage a $2 billion emerging manager mandate on behalf of the Teachers Retirement System of Texas. His investment experience spans category-defining technology businesses across compute, neurotechnology, robotics, and infrastructure. Having founded and operated companies himself, Andrew partners closely with founders at moments of technical and organizational inflection. He began his career as a CPA at Ernst & Young and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Roles
Managing Partner