SignalFire

Ben Davenport is CTO and co-founder of BitGo, which provides infrastructure for Bitcoin and other digital assets. He previously co-founded Beluga, acquired by Facebook and folded into Facebook Messenger, and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Google. He is an active early-stage angel investor across more than 50 companies.

Bobby Lent cofounded Ariba. He currently serves as Managing Director at Hillsven, a $40M seed venture firm investing in internet, cloud, e-commerce, and mobile companies.

Chris Farmer founded a quant-style VC that grants engineers, data scientists and portfolio support equal carry with investing partners, bootstrapped by advisory projects and building Beacon as a full-stack platform.

Deb Ray is co-founder and Chief AI Officer at InferenceCloud.ai. He was previously CTO of EndCue in Los Angeles, where he led an AI platform for analyzing and generating original content, and earlier founded and led technology for two adtech startups. He holds a PhD from Caltech and has worked as a researcher in deep learning and AI for over a decade.

Ellen Levy is the Founder and Managing Director of Silicon Valley Connect and manages a portfolio of around 50 angel investments. Her career includes roles in venture (Softbank, NeoCarta, DFJ), universities (Harvard, Stanford, ASU), large companies (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Apple), and startups, including serving as head of Corporate Development and Strategy at LinkedIn. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MA/PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University.

Evan Richardson works as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. He was part of the founding management team at Grand Rounds, serving as SVP of Medical Network and Corporate Development.

Frank Williams is co-founder and a board director of Evolent Health (NYSE: EVH), which supports payers and providers in value-based care transformation; during his time there the company went public, surpassed $1B in annualized revenue, and served over 15 million patients. Earlier he was chairman and CEO of The Advisory Board Company (NASDAQ: ABCO), a health care research and technology firm that also completed an IPO and grew past $450M in annual revenue. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ilya Kirnos co-founded SignalFire and serves as its CTO. He previously spent 2004-2012 as a software engineer at Google, holding technical leadership roles including Technical Lead for Gmail Ads and AdWords Performance and Scalability, and founding Google Prediction Markets. He later led backend platform development at CardSpring, a payment company acquired by Twitter, and earlier worked at Bell Labs and Oracle. He holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science with a minor in Applied Mathematics from Princeton University.

Jack Huffard is a software executive with over two decades of leadership, go-to-market, and operational experience, having taken a company from founding through IPO. He co-founded cybersecurity company Tenable (NASDAQ: TENB) in 2002, serving as President and COO and later COO, and led its Series A, Series B, and 2018 public offering. Before Tenable he was Director of Corporate Development at Enterasys Networks and held roles at John Hancock and Marriott. He holds a BS from Washington and Lee University and an MBA from Babson College.

Ellen Blix joined SignalFire in 2020 to lead investor relations, overseeing limited partner strategy and communications. She was previously a Managing Director at Commonfund Capital and spent six years as a Vice President and investment strategist at BlackRock, with earlier roles as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and Wasserstein Perella & Co. She holds an S.B. in Biology from MIT and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.

Elaine Zelby is co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Tofu, an agentic demand generation platform for B2B marketing teams. Previously, she worked as an early-stage investor at SignalFire and held go-to-market and marketing leadership roles at early and growth-stage startups. Zelby publishes a weekly newsletter called 3 Things and hosts the (un)sexy podcast.

Wayne Hu is a General Partner at SignalFire, an early-stage investment firm. He previously worked at Google and YouTube, as well as at Kleiner Perkins. His investment focus includes early-stage entrepreneurs operating in established markets.

Laurent Parmentier is Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Stratos, where he leads investment research, sourcing strategy, portfolio support, and operations. Previously, he spent six years as a Partner at SignalFire, where he built operational systems and processes that supported the firm's growth from $50 million to over $2 billion in assets under management. He began his career at The Boston Consulting Group, working across multiple practices and geographies before departing in 2016 as a Principal, and holds engineering and business finance degrees from University College London and Stanford University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Oana Olteanu leverages a Romanian immigrant background to connect with underestimated founders, applies engineering expertise to assess architecture and infrastructure, and coaches them on evaluating VCs and running board meetings.

Tony Huie is CEO and co-founder of Twingate, a cybersecurity platform focused on zero trust security implementation. He previously contributed to product-led growth strategy at Dropbox and brings over two decades of experience in operations and investing across technology companies.

Rikhil Bajaj is Head of Fintech & Tech/Services Investing at Tarsadia Investments. He invests across technology, healthcare, and financial services sectors at various stages and structures. His approach emphasizes research-driven origination, underwriting, and company building.

Chris Scoggins has worked as an entrepreneur, executive, and investor in technology for about twenty-five years, concentrating on SaaS, data services, and applied AI. He most recently led global strategy, revenue, and partnerships at Oracle Data Cloud, joining Oracle in 2015 via its acquisition of Datalogix, where he had built and run the digital business. Earlier in his career he worked in venture capital and co-founded Internet Reports in 1997 (acquired in 2000); he holds an MBA from Stanford and a BS from Trinity University.

Josh Constine is a Venture Partner for Consumer at SignalFire. Previously, he spent eight years as Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch, where he published over 3,000 posts covering product design, social networks, blockchain, and early-stage companies. He holds a Master's degree in cybersociology from Stanford and has moderated over 190 talks across 18 countries with technology leaders and public figures.

Elias Davis applies an ex-Google, data-driven approach and helped transition his firm into an institutional $50M fund, offering unusually hands-on, white-glove support—structuring rounds and assisting key hires.

Taylor Barada is a Venture Partner at SignalFire with background as a general manager in corporate and business development, strategy, and product marketing. His experience spans deal leadership, operations, and advisory work across new product strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and go-to-market planning. His investment interests include consumer healthcare, social commerce, online media, mobile applications, and SaaS.

Aayush Sharma is a Senior Associate at SignalFire, focusing on venture and growth-stage software investments. He was previously a growth equity investor at JMI Equity in San Diego, working on late-stage and pre-IPO software opportunities, and began his career at the Boston Consulting Group. He holds a B.B.A. in Finance from UT Austin, where he founded a student-led consulting organization.

Andrew Reid joined SignalFire in 2023 to support the portfolio with talent acquisition across Go-to-Market functions. He previously built and led the Talent function as Head of Talent at Lead Edge Capital, a growth equity firm, and earlier worked at retained executive search firms Artisanal Talent and SPMB in the San Francisco Bay Area, placing executives for enterprise and consumer clients. He holds a B.A. in Geography/Environmental Studies from UCLA with a minor in Geospatial Information Systems & Technology.

Asher Bantock joined SignalFire in 2023, where he produces data analyses that inform the firm's investment strategy and builds internal tools and systems supporting decision-making. He previously worked as a Staff Data Scientist at Block's Cash App covering banking product analytics, and held data science roles at Medium, Facebook Messenger, and SoundCloud. He holds a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Bill MacCartney is an advisor and investor with two decades of experience in AI. He was VP of Machine Learning at Cohere until the end of 2022, leading a team building large language models, and previously served as Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple, overseeing teams behind QuickType, QuickPath, Shortcuts, Siri Suggestions, and Siri Found In. Earlier he was a Senior Research Scientist at Google working on natural language understanding for search and Google Now, and since 2010 has been an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, teaching the graduate NLP course CS224U.

Brad Hoover previously served as CEO of Grammarly, where he worked on product strategy, team building, business development, and operations. Before that, he was an investor at General Catalyst Partners, focusing on consumer internet, SaaS, and mobile companies, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and Arthur Andersen. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University.

Cali Tran is CEO of Cision, an earned media and PR software company, and CEO of Brandwatch, a consumer intelligence and social media management company. He previously served as CEO of Valassis Digital, a business unit within Harland Clarke Holding Company. He holds an AB in History from Bowdoin College and an MBA from Harvard.

Carrie Wheeler is the CFO of Opendoor and previously served on the company's board. Before Opendoor, she spent over two decades at TPG Global, where she was a partner leading the firm's consumer and retail investments. She has served on the boards of companies including Neiman Marcus, Petco Animal Supplies, Dollar Tree, and APi Group.

Chris Farinacci is a technology executive with over 30 years of experience in software and enterprise technology, and currently serves as an Executive-in-Residence at SignalFire. He was previously Chief Operating Officer at Asana, where he helped scale revenue from roughly $10 million ARR to about $500 million and led the company through its IPO, and before that Chief Marketing Officer for Google Cloud. His earlier roles include positions at Oracle, Agile Software, i2, Aspect Development, Hara Software, and SDRC, and he holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University.

Diane Tang is a Google Fellow who works on analytics and data science across Google, having joined the company in 2003 with earlier roles on the AdsQuality team and in life sciences and health. Her work has covered logging, large-scale data analysis and infrastructure, experiment methodology, and ads systems. She holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard (1995) and a master's and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford (2001), along with multiple patents and publications.

Ding Zhou is a software engineer and data scientist focused on building and optimizing intelligent systems. He currently serves as Head of Ads Engineering at Pinterest, and previously held engineering roles at Facebook, Square, and DoorDash. He earned a Ph.D. from Penn State and a bachelor's degree from Fudan University, both in computer science.

Doug Merritt is President and CEO of Splunk, a role he has held since 2015, after joining the company as Senior Vice President of Field Operations in 2014. His earlier career includes senior roles at Cisco Systems, CEO of Baynote, executive positions at SAP, and General Manager of the Human Capital Management Product Division at PeopleSoft; he also co-founded and led cloud company Icarian. He holds a B.S. from the University of the Pacific.

Ellen Salisbury is Managing Director of Start Smart Labs, an incubator focused on startups building data-intensive applications on Hadoop. She previously served as Vice President of Business Operations at Altiscale and as Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo!. She earned a BA in Humanities from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Loyola University of Chicago.

Emma Hanley joined SignalFire's Product Operations team in 2025 to scale the firm's programs and resources. She previously worked in Go-to-Market strategy at Lumafield, served as Director of Business Initiatives at AppFolio, and worked at Amazon on Whole Foods delivery; she began her career as a specialist in Impressionist and Modern art at Christie's. She holds an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in History of Art from UC Berkeley.

Gana Rajasegaran joined SignalFire in 2026 as Director of Technical Talent, working with portfolio companies on technical talent acquisition across Engineering, ML/AI, Design, and Product. He previously spent about four and a half years at Atlassian as a Lead Technical Recruiter, building engineering and machine learning teams across the US, India, Europe, and Australia, and earlier helped grow Lyft's autonomous vehicle division in Palo Alto. Earlier in his career he recruited for startups in biotechnology, medical devices, SaMD, and digital health with US search firms.

Ginny Curley rejoined SignalFire in May 2021, where she supports the Talent Team and manages recruiting efforts, systems, and programs for portfolio companies. Before returning, she worked at True Search supporting the Head of the Consumer Practice, where she assisted with CXO searches across a range of sectors.

Greg Badros holds bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University and master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, where his Ph.D. work on the Cassowary Constraint Solving algorithm was later incorporated into Apple's OS X and iOS. He spent over six years at Google as a Sr. Director of Engineering, leading AdSense and later the Gmail+ and Google Apps teams, then served as VP Engineering & Products at Facebook, where he led teams including Ads, Search, Photos, Messages, Growth, Data Infrastructure and Data Science. He subsequently founded Prepared Mind Innovations and advises startups while building prototypes.

Heliya Sohrabi joined SignalFire in spring 2021 to handle accounting and financial operations. She previously worked as a Senior Audit Associate at KPMG's San Francisco office, specializing in financial reporting for venture capital funds, and participated in KPMG's leadership program before working with Bay Area registered investment advisors. She is a licensed CPA in California and holds a B.A. in Economics and Accounting from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Yuanling Yuan is a Partner at SignalFire, where he leads Series A-B stage investments with a focus on vertical AI. He works with entrepreneurs across the firm's portfolio companies.