As General Partner and Chief Venture Officer at Fuel Venture Capital, Selene Casabal is on a mission to rewrite the gender imbalance in artificial intelligence one investment at a time. She believes AI is the great equalizer, creating a future where innovation is judged not by who you are, but by what you build.
When she talks about artificial intelligence, her conviction is unmistakable. In an industry long dominated by men—where only about two percent of venture capital dollars flow to women-led startups—Casabal sees both the opportunity and the obligation to shift the narrative. After recently joining Fuel Venture Capital, she’s on a mission to ensure that the next generation of transformational AI companies includes more women at the helm.
“AI doesn’t care what you look like or where you went to school,” Casabal says. “It’s democratizing in a way that few technologies ever have been.”
Casabal’s path to the venture world wasn’t conventional. Born and raised in Miami, she went to the University of Pennsylvania where, as she puts it, “the joke was that everyone goes there to go to Wall Street.” But while her classmates were interviewing for banking jobs, Casabal found herself drawn to the energy of startups. “At Penn, you had founders from companies like Warby Parker and Harry’s coming back to campus, treated like celebrities,” she recalls. “I figured entrepreneurship would be my retirement project someday—but then I thought, why not start now?”
In her senior year, Casabal launched her first venture—an early Amazon third-party seller business with classmates that quickly generated unexpected revenue. “We made about $26,000 in our first month,” she laughs. “It was enough to give me a false sense of confidence.” That taste of success convinced her to forgo a traditional job offer and instead build something of her own.
In 2016, Casabal moved to San Francisco and started her next company, Restored, a retail-tech startup that helped online brands gain physical distribution. “It was my first true tech company,” she says. Within months, she secured backing from Sequoia Capital, raising $1.7 million. The experience was transformational.
“Going from bootstrapping my last company to suddenly being surrounded by top-tier investors—it was life-changing,” she recalls. “I realized that ideas don’t just grow because you work harder; they grow when you connect with the right resources and people.”
Her years in the trenches as both founder and operator gave Casabal a firsthand understanding of what strategic capital really means. “Money can be good or bad,” she says. “If you take funding from the wrong people, it can destroy your business. The best investors are true partners—they help you think through challenges, open doors, and guide you toward product-market fit.”
Now balancing her time between Miami and San Francisco, Casabal is helping to redefine what venture capital can be—both in who it serves and how it operates. At Fuel Venture Capital, she’s building on the firm’s mission of democratizing access to the innovation economy, not just for entrepreneurs but for investors as well.
“Selene is a successful founder and also an investor, which is her superpower. Her addition to the Fuel family is a defining moment, establishing Fuel as a bicoastal powerhouse.” says Jeff Ransdell, founder and managing partner at Fuel “We’re blending founder-driven insights with AI expertise allowing us to continue providing our investors access to investment opportunities in the innovative economy, which are very difficult to gain access to while continuing to support and bring value to world-class founders,”
Fuel’s model is distinct: it gives wealth advisors, a group that historically haven’t had access to many early-stage venture opportunities, access to high-potential startups, particularly in AI, fintech, and frontier technology.
“A traditional VC in San Francisco doesn’t know how to talk to a wealth advisor,” Casabal says. “We’re bridging that gap—bringing smart capital from people who want to participate in the future of technology but haven’t had a clear way in.”
This, she explains, is part of a broader thesis: access and inclusion shouldn’t stop with who gets funded—they should extend to who gets to fund innovation in the first place.
For Casabal, AI represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to level the playing field for women founders. “In the past, women were often pigeonholed into certain sectors—consumer, retail, healthcare,” she says. “If you tried to build in deep tech or enterprise software, people questioned whether you were ‘technical enough.’”
That’s changing fast. In AI, talent speaks louder than pedigree. “When your product works, people don’t care who built it,” she says. “They care that it’s solving a real problem.”
Casabal points out that many women are already shaping AI—just not always from the CEO chair. “We’re in a ‘Hidden Figures’ moment,” she says. “There are so many brilliant female builders working behind the scenes on AI systems, models, and infrastructure.”
She cites examples like Anthropic’s co-founder and OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati as evidence that women are integral to AI’s development. “They might not always be the public face of a company, but they’re absolutely central to how AI is being built.”
Her goal is to help more of these women step into leadership—and ownership—roles. “If we don’t tell our stories, we don’t get seen as part of the narrative,” she says. “That’s why visibility matters. Women in AI need to be out front, building companies, raising capital, and redefining what leadership looks like in tech.”
When advising women entrepreneurs, Casabal’s message is both pragmatic and empowering. “Focus on business fundamentals,” she says. “If you know that raising capital might take longer, make sure your business can sustain itself. Understand your product-market fit, your metrics, your users—everything that matters to your investors.”
She also encourages women to embrace their individuality rather than emulate traditional (often male-defined) models of success.
“In the past, women felt pressure to fit in—to act or dress a certain way, to seem more ‘technical,’” she says. “Today, I see founders leading with their authenticity. They’re proud to say, ‘I’m self-taught. I built this using open tools.’ That confidence is new, and it’s powerful.”
Above all, she tells founders to understand their unfair advantage—what makes them and their company unique. “You can’t lose sight of your story,” she says. “It’s what makes investors believe in you.”
Casabal’s decision to split her time between Silicon Valley and Miami was both personal and strategic. She believes the city is emerging as a vibrant new hub for AI and tech entrepreneurship, offering a counterpoint to the “groupthink” she felt in the Valley.
“Innovation can happen anywhere,” she says. “Some of the most successful AI companies today are based in places like the U.K. or Canada. But the capital is still concentrated in New York and San Francisco. That’s where Fuel sees opportunity—to find the great companies before they come knocking.”
Casabal sees her work at Fuel as a convergence of her passions for entrepreneurship, technology, and equity. By empowering women founders and widening access to venture opportunities, she hopes to catalyze a more inclusive innovation economy—one that reflects the diverse world AI is reshaping.
“I became the investor I wish I’d had,” she says. “Someone who rolls up their sleeves, who’s there before the check clears, who helps you build.”
As AI continues to transform industries from healthcare to finance, Casabal believes women’s perspectives are not just welcome—they’re essential. “AI is being built on human data, human choices,” she says. “If women aren’t part of that process, we’re missing half the intelligence the world has to offer.”
She’s especially bullish on AI’s potential in longevity and healthcare, where innovation could directly improve quality of life. “Doctors do so much with so little data,” she notes. “AI can help them see patterns, test faster, and save lives. That’s real impact.”
But she’s equally inspired by AI’s capacity to empower individuals—to remove creative or technical barriers that once required specialized skills. “It’s about giving people confidence,” she says. “Whether it’s writing an email, launching a business, or designing a product, AI is letting more people express themselves and contribute.”
At Fuel Venture Capital, Casabal’s mission is clear: invest in the people and ideas reshaping the world—and make sure women are central to that story. The firm’s focus on AI, inclusion, and access reflects a new kind of venture ethos: one where capital is not just financial but cultural, shaping who gets to build the future.
“Empowering women in AI isn’t about charity,” she says. “It’s smart business. When you diversify who builds technology, you diversify what technology can do.”
As she settles into her new role, Casabal is optimistic. “I’ve been the founder who couldn’t get a meeting,” she says. “Now I get to be the investor who opens the door. That’s the best part of the job.”
