Evgenia Plotnikova is a General Partner leading investments across AI, infrastructure, and automation. Her first love was political science, which has provided a perspective that still underpins how she invests: she is drawn to moments when a step change in technology meets a structural need the market has underestimated or ignored.
Her conviction has driven some of Dawn’s most defining investments. She backed Dataiku long before the market grasped the scale of the AI opportunity, and it has since become the standard for how enterprises govern and deploy AI at scale. Fonoa tackles tax compliance across hundreds of jurisdictions, a problem only AI-powered software can solve at the speed global commerce demands. inforcer empowers managed service providers to deliver AI to millions of small businesses, leveraging the power of Microsoft. She has also supported teams through major exits, including Granulate’s acquisition by Intel, Shoreline’s acquisition by Nvidia, and Zivver’s acquisition by Kiteworks.
Evgenia works tirelessly for the founders she backs and the investors who have trusted Dawn with their capital. As one of Dawn’s earliest employees, she knows what it means to be in the room when something is small and to stay through every stage of the journey. She is a superconnector with a broad and deep network, and her greatest joy is putting it to work for the founders — the introduction that unlocks a key hire, a strategic partnership, a path into a new market, or an investment.
The founders she gravitates to share something in common: raw ambition, the instinct to keep raising the bar and the desire to build with trust, self-awareness and empathy at the core. That combination is what she believes produces companies that last. It also reflects her own path: born in a working-class family on the border between Russia and Ukraine, raised in a one-bedroom flat with six family members and educated on a scholarship in France and the US, she learned to start from scratch more than once. She built her career from nothing — driven by hunger, curiosity, and a refusal to take anything for granted.
Evgenia is the youngest woman in Europe to be internally promoted to General Partner, a Kauffman Fellow, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree and one of Business Insider’s 100 Coolest People in Tech. Before Dawn, she spent over a decade advising and investing at Atomico, TPG Capital, and J.P. Morgan. She is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, where she holds a Master’s in Finance and a BA in Political Science, and studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
