Ilya Kirnos

Founding Partner & CTO at SignalFire

Los Altos, California

Overview

Ilya Kirnos is the Founding Partner at SignalFire, an investment firm in Los Altos, California, where he focuses on investing in various sectors including Consumer Internet, AI, SaaS, and Enterprise, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a background as a Tech Lead at CardSpring (acquired by Twitter) and experience as a Software Engineer at Google and Oracle, Ilya has successfully invested in a range of companies like OneSignal, Form Health, and Argyle across different funding stages, showcasing his expertise in identifying and supporting promising startups.

Work Experience

SignalFire

Founding Partner & CTO
2013 - Current
SignalFire is a complete redesign of the modern venture firm based on six years of careful study and development by a team of world class investors and engineers trained at General Catalyst, KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz, Yahoo and Google. The end result is a radically different model that brings unparalleled firepower at the early stage to solve the biggest entrepreneur pain points. Our distributed network approach provides expert advice from some of the world's best entrepreneurs, product & engineering leaders in virtually every key discipline and industry. We have developed a first of its kind centralized infrastructure to help with recruiting exceptional talent, business development, customer acquisition as well as educational & community events. We don’t follow the crowd, and almost always lead our investment rounds as the first institutional investors in exceptional companies. You can read more about SignalFire at: https://medium.com/signalfire-fund

SignalFire is a venture capital firm that invests in seed stage companies and breakout companies.

signalfire.com

CardSpring (acquired by Twitter)

Tech Lead
2012 - 2013

Cardspring offers an application platform enabling app developers to write applications for credit cards and other types of payments.

Raised $19,825,000.00 from Accel, Morado Ventures, Greylock, Morado Ventures, SV Angel, Accel, Cyriac Roeding, Felicis, Techammer and Win.app.

cardspring.com

Google

Software Engineer
2004 - 2012
Gmail Ads Targeting, lead: user modeling for fun and profit AdWords Frontend Performance/Scalability, lead: ensuring stability and performance of the AdWords FE, which is responsible for $XXB of revenue. Performance monitoring infrastructure: built a non-intrusive, automated monitor of Java, C++, and MySQL services running in production. It is used to improve the performance and stability of hundreds of different projects at Google. It also provides automatic error detection and notification using log mining. Prediction markets: led a team which built prediction markets at Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/putting-crowd-wisdom-to-work.html

Google is a multinational corporation that specializes in Internet-related services and organizes the world’s information.

Raised $26,100,000.00 from Angel Investors LP, Kleiner Perkins, Signatures Capital, Sequoia Capital, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shaquille O'Neal, Henry Kissinger, Google and Tiger Woods.

google.com