Selene
Casabal

Casabal grew up in Miami. She went to Penn, where she stumbled into entrepreneurship the way most great founders do - sideways, by accident, with classmates. In her senior year, she launched an early Amazon third-party seller business. It generated unexpected revenue. Not a unicorn, but a proof of concept: markets reward people who move before the crowd notices. That lesson stuck.

She also won the Penn in Washington scholarship, working in Senator Bob Casey's judiciary office on immigration, healthcare, and civil rights policy. The combination of startup instincts and policy fluency would prove useful later - when the technologies she was backing started touching regulated industries, public infrastructure, and the governance of AI itself.

Her flagship company, Re:store, was the kind of venture that sounds obvious in retrospect. Physical retail was not dead - it was misfiring. Casabal built a company around making retail spaces work for technology brands that didn't fit the traditional shelf model. b8ta acquired it. The acquisition made her an operator inside the largest physical tech retail network in the world, and it made her an unusually credible voice on the intersection of physical and digital commerce.

After b8ta, she moved into advising - Popshop Live, then Chanel's Global Open Innovation team, where she was handpicked to advise C-suite executives on product strategy and emerging technology. The Chanel relationship is worth noting. It is unusual. Most frontier tech investors do not have longstanding advisory relationships with French luxury fashion houses. Casabal does, because she can translate the language of frontier technology into the language of brand strategy without losing something in the translation.

Intel came next. As executive advisor to Intel Ignite, the chip giant's deep tech acceleration program, she worked directly with founders building in cybersecurity, AI, and robotics. She was not a bystander. She was evaluating companies, mentoring teams, and getting a detailed view of where the hard problems in AI infrastructure actually lived.

The Sequoia Scout partnership changed everything. It gave her a formal vehicle for the angel investing she had been doing informally and gave her access to deal flow and due diligence infrastructure at the level of one of Silicon Valley's most respected institutions. Her portfolio from that period - Perplexity, Replit, Impulse Space, Serve Robotics - reflects genuine conviction, not trend-chasing. Perplexity was not a consensus bet when she made it. Neither was Impulse Space, which is building in commercial space propulsion. These are founder-first bets, made early, held with conviction.

South Park Commons is where she spent the years between her Scout partnership and Fuel VC. The San Francisco-based community of technologists is known for incubating ideas before they become companies. The people who would go on to found Anthropic and Cognition AI were working through their ideas in that same physical and intellectual community while Casabal was there. Whether or not she invested directly in those companies, the proximity shaped her understanding of what frontier AI actually looks like before it has a pitch deck.

At Fuel VC, she is combining all of it. The operational credibility of a founder with two exits. The pattern recognition of a Sequoia Scout. The deep tech fluency of an Intel advisor. The AI thesis of someone who was in the room when the current wave was forming. Her mandate is not just to deploy capital but to reshape Fuel VC's identity as a player in the AI ecosystem, and to do it from both coasts - the firm's Miami roots and her Silicon Valley presence functioning as complementary advantages rather than competing priorities.

The gender thesis runs through everything. Only about 2% of venture capital dollars flow to women-led startups. Casabal has said plainly that she sees this as a market inefficiency, not just a moral failure. Her specific interest in women-led AI startups is grounded in a pragmatic argument: if the technology reshaping every industry is being built almost entirely by one demographic, the resulting tools will reflect those gaps. She is not the first person to make this argument, but she is making it from the position of someone who has now backed companies backed by Sequoia, Benchmark, and Khosla - which is a different conversation than the one most equity advocates are having.

In early 2026, she appeared in Refresh Miami's annual roundup of the VCs writing the checks - a fitting entry point for a year in which Fuel VC is expected to close a significant new round of AI-focused deals. The firm already has two unicorns in its portfolio across five funds. Casabal's job is to find the next ones before the price reflects the consensus.