Ilya Kirnos

Ilya Kirnos is the co-founder, managing partner, and CTO of ~$3 billion AUM early-stage venture firm SignalFire. He leads the development of SignalFire’s in-house Beacon AI data platform, which he’s been building for a decade with the firm’s team of AI PhDs, engineers, and data scientists. Beacon tracks more than 660 million employees and 80 million companies to guide the fund’s investing by surfacing high-quality founders and fast-growing companies, and assist its portfolio companies with recruiting and customer acquisition. As an investor, Ilya focuses on backing seed to Series B companies in enterprise infrastructure and developer tools. He supports highly technical startups in SignalFire’s portfolio including Horizon3 (autonomous pen-testing), OneSignal (notification infrastructure), and PlanetScale (scalable databases). Prior to co-founding SignalFire, Ilya was the Engineering Lead at CardSpring, a start-up payments platform that was acquired by Twitter in 2014. Before that, Ilya was a Software Engineer at Google from 2004 to 2012 where he was a Technical Lead for Gmail Ads and AdWords performance and scalability. Ilya was also the founder and Technical Lead for Google Prediction Markets. Ilya started his software engineering career at Bell Labs and Oracle after graduating from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in Computer Science and a minor in Applied Mathematics.