Cristina Fonseca

Here’s how a near-death experience in the ICU and getting hit by a car led this entrepreneur to build a unicorn.

At 22, Cristina Fonseca had two options.
1) Take the high-paying job offers from big tech.
2) Bet on herself.

She chose the second.

Why?

Well…her body had already forced her to make the decision.

While finishing her Master’s in Telecommunications and Networks Engineering, Cristina spent a week in the ICU.

50/50 survival odds.

She made it.

Then, a year later, while leaving work, she was hit by a car.

Another wake-up call.

That’s when she decided: I’m not going to live by other people’s standards.

So she started building.

In 2011, Cristina co-founded Talkdesk, a cloud-based call center that could be set up in 5 minutes using just a web browser.

She and her co-founder flew to Silicon Valley for a startup competition.

Jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, coding on the plane and rehearsing at 5AM.

They won.

Talkdesk was on the map.

Over the next 5 years, Cristina did everything.

Engineering. UX. Product. Marketing. Customer support.

She built the first version of the product.

Then she built the team. 75 engineers in Portugal.

And she scaled it.

150 employees, $24M raised from Salesforce Ventures, DFJ, Storm Ventures, and 500Startups.

In 2018, Talkdesk raised $100M in Series B and hit unicorn status.

It became Portugal’s third unicorn.

Eventually, Cristina stepped down from daily operations.

She didn’t want to repeat the same formula. She wanted to learn again.

So she went back to the fundamentals.

She joined Singularity University, specializing in AI.

She built a second startup: Cleverly.ai, applying machine learning to customer service.

Scaling Cleverly meant working closely with a handful of customers until the product was strong enough to scale.

It paid off.

In 2021, Zendesk, the same company that once competed with Talkdesk, acquired Cleverly.

Cristina became VP of Product.

But that wasn’t her only move.

In 2018, she also became Venture Partner at Indico Capital Partners, Portugal’s first private VC fund.

She’s now General Partner at the fund.

She also sits on the Board of Galp, Portugal’s largest energy company.