About

Ciao! I'm Roberto. I am a Technical Investor at the AI Fund of CDP Venture Capital, where I focus on post-seed AI, Cyber, and Quantum startups. I also advise most of the funds on AI deals. My technical background lets me engage deeply with founders and CTOs on their products and technology.

Previously I was an AI Researcher at ETH Zurich, working with Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Mrinmaya Sachan on LLM evaluation and causal reasoning.

MSc in Data Science from EPFL · BSc in Economics & Computer Science from Bocconi University.

If you are an AI startup founder looking for feedback, book a slot with me.

Currently Tinkering

Side projects and research threads I'm actively working on.

Local AI models via MLX Doomscrolling agents AI Safety research

Current Portfolio

Deals at the AI Fund of CDP Venture Capital since January 2025. Dual goal: financial returns and growth of the Italian AI ecosystem.

3D scanners that turn physical objects into reality-grade digital twins
Quantum-inspired methods that compress AI models
AI platform to automate back-office of financial advisors and wealth managers
Quantum computing software for design, optimization, and execution of quantum algorithms
Intelligent humanoid robots made in Italy, co-invested with Tether and AMD
German biotech-quantum startup revolutionizing MRI with quantum sensing technology
Italian AI platform transforming hospitality with autonomous agents and dynamic pricing (€47M round)
One of the world's leading quantum computing research companies, widely expected to achieve quantum advantage, recently moved to Italy

Experience

Technical Investor / Data Scientist
Nov 2024 – Present
Visiting Scientist
Feb – Oct 2024
Deep Learning Researcher
SLB
Jul 2023 – Jan 2024
Student Researcher, Causal Representation Learning
VITA Lab, EPFL
Sep 2022 – Jan 2023
Student Researcher, GANs for Biological Systems
LPBS Lab, EPFL
Nov 2022 – Feb 2023
Business Analyst Intern, Technology
Barclays PLC
Jun – Sep 2020

Research

Focused on LLM evaluation via natural questions and causal reasoning.

13K naturally occurring questions from search engines, human–human, and human–LLM interactions. Accepted at CALM @ NeurIPS 2024 and NAACL Findings 2025.

NLP Causality

Evaluation framework using questions that reflect real user behavior rather than curated benchmarks.

LLM Evals

Projects

Web app with visualizations and search on Italian train delays. Open-source initiative to promote railway data transparency.

Web Open Data

Re-implemented Pix2Seq-D from TensorFlow to PyTorch and adapted the architecture for video panoptic segmentation.

Computer Vision PyTorch Video

Used Causal Representation Learning to improve classifier accuracy on out-of-distribution data.

Causality ML PDF

NLP analysis of Quotebank (178M rows) measuring lexical complexity differences across American politicians.

NLP Big Data

Fine-tuned Distilled GPT-2 with a Deberta reward model using Constitutional AI, biasing outputs toward clarity, correctness, and rigour for STEM students.

NLP RLHF PDF

Generated realistic synthetic images of C. elegans using StyleGAN2-ADA for settings where biological data is scarce.

Generative Models Computer Vision GitHub

Built a probabilistic journey planner for Zurich using SBB data, matching Google Maps results with added confidence scores.

Big Data Spark Video

Survey on Nash equilibria approximation via CFR and reinforcement learning from self-play for poker bots.

Game Theory RL PDF

Compared MCMC algorithms (Metropolis-Hastings, Houdayer) for community detection, analyzing convergence and cluster connectivity.

Statistics Algorithms PDF

Affiliations

Essays

Thoughts on AI, investing, and technology.

Jan 2024
On two kinds of people: those who go deep and perfect, and those who hold the big picture.
Dec 2023
Could LLM-based generative agents replace traditional models as a sandbox for simulating human behavior?