Amanda Coutinho, director of innovation investments at ISA Capital, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2026.
While working as a wealth manager, Amanda Coutinho enjoyed the challenge of exploring new markets to identify strong assets and the discipline of portfolio construction, but the outcome felt increasingly hollow.
“I realised that it was not aligned with my purpose in life – I was just making rich people richer and that was not very fulfilling,” she says.
After a sabbatical spent in Kenya, where she volunteered helping women entrepreneurs set up businesses, she knew she wanted to work with startups. When she returned to Brazil, she joined ACE Ventures, where she helped design and operate multiple corporate venture capital programmes, giving her broad exposure to multiple theses, different corporate cultures and first-hand visibility into what made some programmes gain traction or fail.
“Sometimes we get carried away by hype or headlines and forget about implementation, and that can jeopardise the entire programme.”
Over time, she became increasingly interested in seeing the full corporate venture lifecycle, not just investments but implementation inside large organisations and the creation of strategic value. Now, as she charts the way for energy transmission company ISA’s venturing strategy and is actively growing her team, she sees a straight line between startup technology and real impact on quality of life in the region.
“For me, the implied impact is the most important part, bringing technologies that can help the energy transition in my region,” she says. She points to investments that address the constraints in Brazil’s energy system, such as transmission bottlenecks that cause renewable energy to be wasted.
From her experience helping build CVC programmes, Coutinho is clear-eyed about how fragile they can be and urges others to keep their eyes on the prize. “Sometimes we get carried away by hype or headlines and forget about implementation, and that can jeopardise the entire programme,” she says.
Newcomers, she says, should focus on stakeholder management at least as much, if not more, than technical skills.
The Rising Stars are early-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2026 here.
