Cristina Fonseca was born on November 14, 1987, in Cercal, Ourem, Portugal. She studied telecommunications and networks engineering at Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, where she met Tiago Paiva.
In 2011 the two founded Talkdesk. The prototype won a Twilio-hosted hackathon, and the company went through the 500 Startups program. Fonseca built the engineering team in Portugal.
She left the company in 2016 and stayed a shareholder. That year she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for enterprise technology. In 2017 she became an Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum.
In 2018 she joined Indico Capital Partners as a venture partner. Indico is described as the first Portuguese private venture fund for early-stage tech startups in Portugal and Spain. She also completed the Global Solutions Program at Singularity University and specialized in artificial intelligence.