Prior to co-founding SignalFire, Ilya was a Software Engineer at Google (2004-2012). During his time at Google, Ilya held several technical leadership positions. He was a Technical Lead for Gmail Ads and was responsible for predicting consumer purchase intent and consumer Gmail monetization. Ilya was also a Technical Lead for AdWords Performance and Scalability where he managed responsiveness and uptime of the AdWords frontend. Ilya was also the founder and Technical Lead for Google Prediction Markets, where he led the engineering team from conception to product launch.
After Google, Ilya joined CardSpring, a payment platform company backed by Accel and Greylock Partners. At CardSpring, Ilya led platform backend development. CardSpring was acquired by Twitter.
Ilya started his software engineering career at Bell Labs and Oracle. Ilya graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in Computer Science and a minor in Applied Mathematics.
June 3, 2026
Is software dead? Are we in an AI bubble? SignalFire's CTO, Ilya Kirnos, ranks the 4 arguments driving the "SaaSpocalypse" and breaks down where true defensibility and enterprise tech moats live now.
April 7, 2025
We’re proud to share that SignalFire has closed on over $1 billion in new capital, bringing our total assets under management to ~$3 billion. We’re solidifying our commitment to applied AI as the defining opportunity of our time. We intend to remain hyper-focused on founders at the earliest stages (pre-seed through Series B), helping them grow from ideation to industry leadership.
August 26, 2024
As reinforcement learning continues to evolve, its potential to transform industries by enabling machines to learn and adapt is immense.
August 22, 2024
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape, ushering in tools that can automatically generate, complete, and optimize code with increasing sophistication.
March 14, 2024
Customers connect data sources to Lago without the need for pre-aggregation or data cleaning, and can make use of a meticulously designed UI for business teams.
January 31, 2024
A Harvard diploma, a PhD, or stint at Google are no longer the best signifiers of the top minds in artificial intelligence. Instead, hirers should look for engineers and researchers with applied AI experience at a group of nine startups that our data shows have the highest concentration of AI talent.
January 9, 2024
I’m often asked what it means to be a venture firm CTO, so I wrote this post to share what an org structure with engineering at its core unlocks for our investment and portfolio success strategies.
November 16, 2023
Understand LLMs better with this guide to prompt engineering, fine-tuning, LoRA, and other efficient ways to improve AI models.
October 12, 2023
At SignalFire, we’re not only investing in AI companies, but we’re also building an AI-driven venture firm day-to-day.
September 28, 2023
Built on OpenTelemetry, SigNoz puts all your critical monitoring metrics in one place with predictable pricing
September 26, 2023
Kolena turns AI model comparison, testing, and validation into a science instead of a haphazard art. It allows developers to build AI systems characterized by safety, reliability, and fairness.
June 14, 2023
Point solutions fall shot and midmarket customers don't scale, so data infra founders should build complete enterprise solutions
March 30, 2023
SignalFire is investing in Fixie, a pioneer in LLMOps. Fixie provides APIs and SDKs that integrate LLMs with existing applications easily.
March 22, 2023
Machine learning is a staple of our investments at SignalFire. We are interested in MLOps, AI infrastructure, and native LLMOps.
September 1, 2022
After leading its Series A and B, SignalFire backs OneSignal’s new $50M Series C
April 14, 2022
SignalFire is joining Twingate's $42M Series B to help it build a modern enterprise VPN that doesn't cause latency or performance issues.
March 15, 2022
SignalFire is leading a $6M seed for Plural, which provides a single, seamless experience to manage all your open source applications.
March 2, 2022
Why SignalFire is leading a $16M seed to change the future of engineering operations with Faros