Emily Dinu
Founder & Managing Partner
Emily Dinu is the Founder and Managing Partner of Numinous Capital. While she grew up in a family of artists, her own creativity found its expression in building businesses. Starting her career as an entrepreneur in operations and support, she identified a natural arbitrage: providing technical and operational infrastructure that allows established companies to adapt and scale. By 19, she had founded an independent operations firm, filling critical execution gaps for startups, venture funds, and private equity groups.
This ground-floor immersion set the stage for a 15-year career in the venture ecosystem. Having worked inside hundreds of businesses and investment firms, Emily developed a rigorous, operator-led pattern recognition for which models are built to withstand industrial scaling and which will fracture. She spent her first decade mastering portfolio operations, diligence, and investor relations before transitioning to direct institutional investing. To date, she has facilitated over $500 million in capital flows, including $310 million in fund structuring and $80 million in direct investments.
Her perspective is firmly rooted in the physical world. As Director of Business Operations for MueKo Machinery, she managed the industrial realities of advanced manufacturing through its acquisition by the ASYS Group. She also served as Operations Lead for BKCM LLC, helping launch one of the world’s first crypto hedge funds and a pioneering ETF led by a Wall Street Veteran and CNBC Fast Money correspondent.
Today, Emily leverages this zero-to-one operational rigor to actively build the infrastructure of the deep-tech ecosystem. She sits on the board of Georgia Life Sciences and serves as a key leader within Princeton University’s Advancing Photonics Technologies (APT) initiative, architecting the commercialization pipelines that pull raw IP out of the lab. Combined with her role as a Mentor for the NSF I-Corps, this hands-on approach to ecosystem building grants Numinous Capital proprietary, first-look access to the nation's most critical physical technologies.
Emily holds a BS in Clinical Psychology with a focus on Neuroscience, an education applied directly to diagnosing founder bandwidth and organizational design, and a Master’s in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Harvard Extension School. When she isn't underwriting deep tech, she can be found sailing, horseback riding, or performing morning farm labor at a sanctuary for senior animals to achieve mental clarity before the work day begins.
Dean Ahdab
Venture Fellow; Operations Assistant
Dean serves as Numinous Capital's Venture Fellow and Operations Assistant, where he works closely with Emily to vet deep-tech investment opportunities and help lead Numinous commercialization audits. His skill set lies at the intersection of deep technical research and the ability to translate that research into commercially viable products.
Dean earned his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering, with a minor in Mathematics, from Johns Hopkins University. He also holds two master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from Princeton University. He is currently completing his PhD in Civil Engineering at Princeton University where his research focuses on the strength of steel plate girders in buildings and bridges. He also spends time serving as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses.
In addition, Dean has earned licenses and certifications in Sustainability and Business Skills through Princeton University’s GradFUTURES Learning Cohort program and is has recently achieved a certification in Consulting.
In his free time, Dean enjoys spending time with family and friends, following and investing in financial markets, and doing a variety of physical workouts.