Ilya Kirnos
Founding Partner & CTO
Investor Bay Area
Background
- Co-Founded SignalFire in 2013 as Founding Partner and CTO
- Software Engineer at Google (2004–2012) — held multiple technical leadership positions over 8 years
- Led backend development at CardSpring — payment platform company backed by Accel and Greylock, acquired by Twitter
- Started career at Bell Labs and Oracle
- Princeton University — BSE in Computer Science, minor in Applied Mathematics
- Built and leads SignalFire's Beacon AI data platform — an $80M investment in proprietary ML infrastructure for venture capital
- Oversees a team of engineers and data scientists at SignalFire
Investment Focus
- Enterprise infrastructure and developer tools
- Data infrastructure and applications
- Engineering-led companies with strong technical foundations
- Applied AI across healthcare, cybersecurity, infrastructure, consumer, and enterprise verticals
- Pre-Seed through Series B
Notable Investments
PlanetScale (scalable databases — board member), OneSignal (notification infrastructure — board member), Horizon3 (autonomous pen-testing), SigNoz (open-source observability — led $6.5M seed), Faros AI (engineering intelligence), and other enterprise infrastructure and developer tools companies.
AI Agent Relevance
- Strong fit for AI infrastructure — Ilya explicitly focuses on enterprise infrastructure and developer tools, and sits on the boards of infrastructure companies (PlanetScale, OneSignal)
- As a former Google engineer who built SignalFire's own Beacon AI platform, he has deep firsthand experience building AI infrastructure at scale
- SignalFire's data-driven approach means they can identify traction signals early — if your product has real usage, they will find it
- Massive check size flexibility: $100K pre-seed to $30M Series A/B, meaning they can enter early and follow on aggressively
- The XIR program can pair your company with an experienced executive — operational leverage beyond capital
- $3B AUM and $1B fresh capital means they are actively deploying and not capital-constrained
- SignalFire's Beacon AI talent platform can help with recruiting — critical for infrastructure companies competing for engineering talent
- NOTE: SignalFire is highly data-driven. Having quantitative signals of traction (usage metrics, growth rates, developer adoption) will strengthen your pitch significantly