Founder & CEO at SignalFire · Joined 2013
View Live Interactive Profile →Chris Farmer built his path to venture capital through Bain & Company technology consulting, a stint turning around wireless SaaS company Skybitz, and investing roles at Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst, where he led a seed program that backed Coinbase, Discord, Stripe, Venmo, and Zapier before any of them were obvious winners. He founded SignalFire in 2013 with Ilya Kirnos on a genuinely different premise: build a venture firm the way a technology company builds a product, with an in-house engineering and data science team holding equal standing to investing partners, all sharing carry rather than crediting individual deal partners. That platform, called Beacon AI, tracks more than 650 million people and 80 million organizations to identify talent and market trends years ahead of consensus, and Farmer has personally bootstrapped the model from the start - running corporate advisory projects in SignalFire's early days just to cover AWS bills that exceeded the first fund's management fees. SignalFire has grown into a $3 billion applied-AI-focused firm, closing over $1 billion in new capital in a single raise in April 2025.