Marta Gómez Mariano, investment manager at Repsol, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Marta Gómez joined Repsol’s venture capital team after more than a decade at the company. When she was offered the opportunity to move into venture seven years ago, she saw it as a chance to discover a new world, while remaining anchored in a large organisation. The appeal was the balance: staying inside a big company, while gaining exposure to external technologies, people and ways of working that would otherwise remain distant.
“Marta’s contributions go far beyond traditional advisory roles. She has been instrumental in establishing alliances with investors and potential clients,” says Repsol’s director for corporate venturing and open innovation, Gema García González.
“Marta’s contributions go far beyond traditional advisory roles. She has been instrumental in establishing alliances with investors and potential clients”
Gómez says the most rewarding aspect of the role is the constant learning. Working in venture has put her in close contact with founders, technologists and management teams with very different perspectives and operating styles. She values not only discovering new technologies, but also seeing how different teams organise themselves, make decisions and grow companies from early stage into something larger and more robust.
It has reshaped how she understands company building. Watching teams figure out how to scale, improve their operations and professionalise their organisations has been as instructive as the technologies themselves.
Looking ahead, she is particularly interested in robotics and automation technologies that can make traditional industrial processes more efficient and autonomous. These technologies, she says, will present opportunities in the coming years, as industries are pushed to improve efficiency and adapt to a rapidly changing world.
For younger professionals entering corporate venture, Gómez’s advice is simple and grounded in experience: be patient. Success comes from learning how to bridge two very different worlds, namely the agility of startups and the slower, heavier movement of large corporations.
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
