Oana Olteanu
Principal at SignalFire
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Founder
2025 - Current
I'm building a new VC firm called Motive Force, focused on investments in new companies building beautiful software.
VC: Associate (Scale VP) -> Principal to Partner (SignalFire)
2018 - 2024
Signalfire: Principal (2020) -> Partner (2022) until Dec 2024 Partner to founders - leading pre-seed, seed Investments to date: — spaCy / Explosion.ai (seed) — fixie.ai (seed) — enso.org (seed) — kolena.com (seed) — Kurtosis.com (seed) — plural.sh (seed) — budibase.com (seed) — stealth LLM CI/CD (pre-seed) — stealth vercel for LLMs (seed) — stealth voice ordering with gen AI (seed) — getlago.com (seed) Scale VP: Sr. Associate 2018 - 2020 Investments to date: - observe.ai (Series A) — flatfile (Series A) - honeycomb (Series A) - Proscia (Series B) - AllyO (Series B) Green card
Working Student -> Office of the CEO
2011 - 2018
SAP HQ Germany: Nov 2011 - Aug 2015 in the organization of the CTO Vishal Sikka. Built internal tool to capture meta data for 10s of thousands products spanning 25 industries and 11 business functions. SAP in Palo Alto: Aug 2015 - Oct 2018 Office of the CEO Bill McDermott, building products in partnership with native Silicon Valley companies such as Slack, Uber, Facebook. Worked on enterprise NLP product development for Concur, Ariba and SuccesFactors and contributed to the development of CoPilot, internal enterprise NLP platform, by helping partners build apps on top of it and identifying usecases. L1 visa SAP in SF: 11/2017 - 10/2018 joined SAP.io - SAP's internal venture $35M fund to extend SAP products and expose the right cloud APIs. Lead on all Bay Area deals, lead ML investments in voice from SRI (for CS), plum ML (to extend SuccessFactors) applied to recruiting and Akorda ML for legal. H1B visa
SAP IoT Start up Accelerator is a global co-innovation program for B2B startups innovating in the world of the Internet of Things.
Machine Learning Engineer
2010 - 2010
Implementing unsupervised learning algorithms for OCR
Designed a space station
2007 - 2008
Grand Prize in the international contest organized by NASA Ames https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/Contest/