Ilya Kirnos

Founding Partner & CTO at SignalFire · Joined 2013

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Biography

Ilya Kirnos co-founded SignalFire in 2013 and serves as its Partner and CTO, covering seed through Series A and B investments. Before SignalFire he was a software engineer at Google from 2004 to 2012, where he was technical lead for Gmail Ads and for AdWords performance and scalability, and he later led platform backend development at CardSpring, which Twitter acquired. He began his career at Bell Labs and Oracle, and he holds a B.S.E. in computer science from Princeton University. He writes SignalFire's investment announcements for engineering-led companies including SigNoz, Kolena and Lago, and SEC Form D filings list him as a director of Horizon 3 AI and SimpleDataLabs.

Education

Previous Experience

Notable Investments

SyncariArgyleProphiaSigNozKolenaLagoHorizon 3 AISimpleDataLabs (Prophecy)

Board Seats

Career Timeline

2004
Joined Google as a software engineer, later serving as technical lead for Gmail Ads and for AdWords performance and scalability.
2013
Co-founded SignalFire and took the role of Partner and CTO.
2020
Led SignalFire's $6.5M seed investment in Syncari and joined the company's board.
2022
Joined Argyle's board of directors as SignalFire backed the company's $55M Series B.
2023
Authored SignalFire's investment announcements for SigNoz and Kolena.
2025
Named as a director of Horizon 3 AI in the company's Form D filing.

Sources & References

SignalFire - Ilya Kirnos ↗SignalFire - Team ↗SignalFire - We've raised another $1 billion to back the next generation of applied AI startups ↗SEC Form D - Horizon 3 AI, Inc. (filed 2025-05-22) ↗SEC Form D - SimpleDataLabs Inc (filed 2024-10-10) ↗