Maria Davidson is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where she focuses on public policy reform, affordability, and economic trends.

Davidson is the co-founder of California Renewal, an endowment focused on investing in California. She is also the founder and former CEO of Kojo, the largest construction procurement platform in the United States. Davidson has raised the most venture capital funding of any female founder in construction tech history, and previously co-founded RCI, a financial technology company, which was acquired by Addepar in 2020.

Davidson is an active angel investor and sits on the board of Orascom Development Holding, a real estate development company. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, TechCrunch, and Forbes. She has been featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Inc.com’s Top 100 Female Founders, and Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech, and Davidson previously won Ernst & Young’s Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year award. Davidson started her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and she holds an MA from Oxford University, where she was president of the Oxford Union.