Chris Farmer

Chris Farmer is the CEO, Partner, and co-founder of venture fund SignalFire, a $2.1 billion AI-native early-stage venture firm. A decade ago, Farmer pioneered the use of data and AI would let VCs source better investments while scalably helping portfolio companies. So Farmer built Beacon, SignalFire’s in-house AI platform, with the help of Google veterans, Stanford AI PhDs, and feedback from 500 founders on what they really needed. Now Beacon crunches a half trillion data points to rank over 650 million people in the tech ecosystem on talent and hireability to assist portfolio companies with recruiting and go-to-market. At SignalFire, Farmer has led investments in companies like Grammarly, Frame.io, ClassDojo, and Stampli. The firm writes lead checks from seed to Series B with a focus on sectors including health and life sciences tech, developer tools, cybersecurity, and vertical AI SAAS. Previously, Farmer was a successful entrepreneur, spearheading the turnaround of wireless-enabled SaaS company Skybitz, preparing it for its acquisition by Telular Corporation. Farmer built one of the first technologies for startup investment sourcing while at Bessemer Venture Partners in 2007 to track the new Apple App Store. He then joined General Catalyst, where he led seed investing in iconic companies like Alation, Coinbase, Discord, Fivetran, Getaround, Segment, Stripe, and Zapier. Most recently, Farmer launched SignalFire’s AI Lab to handpick high-potential founders and partner them with top corporations in their sector as design partners, pilot customers, and training data providers.