How Oana Olteanu Became a Top Early-Stage Startup Investor

Oana Olteanu turned down a job at artificial intelligence lab Poolside. She took the upside instead.

Then a partner at early-stage venture firm SignalFire, Olteanu had impressed Poolside founder Eiso Kant as someone who understood machine learning and could get exceptional engineers on the phone. Kant asked her to leave venture and help him build a tech team. Olteanu declined. She wanted to keep investing.

So Kant offered her a different way in: a chance to invest personally. Olteanu wrote a small personal check to Poolside, which is now valued at $12 billion.

That bet is helping power her next move: launching her own seed firm, Motive Force. The firms backs early-stage startups, mainly at the pre-seed and seed rounds, in areas including artificial intelligence, enterprise software, and robotics. Its mission is to find technical outsiders and overlooked founders before the rest of Silicon Valley catches on.

The timing could hardly be tougher. First-time funds are a difficult sell in any market. In this one, Olteanu says, fewer rounds are getting done, and capital is clustering into mega-rounds led by giant firms. Smaller funds cannot match the biggest checks or always get into the rounds everyone wants. The institutions that fund venture firms, meanwhile, put more dollars behind the firms they believe still have access to hot deals.

When I spoke to Olteanu this month, she did not sound especially worried. Her pitch is that the market’s obsession with a chosen few creates an opening for a smaller, nimbler investor able to find founders “early when it’s not obvious” and often “before they even think of raising” a formal round of capital. Olteanu declined to share details about her fund, citing rules that prohibit investors from marketing a fundraise.

So far, she has some early signs of success. Poolside is the splashiest example. Her track record also includes spotting Inngest, whose tools help software teams ensure multi-step software tasks finish reliably, before it raised funding from Altimeter Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. She also backed MaintainX, a software startup for industrial teams that helps them monitor and maintain equipment, which is now valued at $2.5 billion.

‘I joined VC for a green card’

Olteanu relates to the outliers she backs. She grew up in rural Romania in a home with no computer. At 18, she entered a NASA contest to design a space station and won the grand prize. The award led to her first-ever plane ride, a trip that took her to the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of the Bay Area.

She spent the following years in Germany, putting herself through a computer science degree by working three jobs. She was so strapped for cash that she petitioned the German government for a special waiver to work more hours than the legal student limit. Eventually, a full-time offer from enterprise giant SAP gave her the visa she needed to return to California.

Her introduction to the local elite was entirely accidental. Knowing nothing about Bay Area neighborhoods, in 2015 she rented a room on Craigslist that happened to be in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Los Altos Hills. Her landlord was an early engineer at Atari, and her neighbor was Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Olteanu, meanwhile, drove a beat-down Kia Rio.

While she felt like an outsider in her neighborhood, she was becoming an insider in the burgeoning artificial intelligence scene. She spent her nights at machine-learning meetups alongside engineers who would go on to lead Anthropic and OpenAI. By day, as a 22-year-old in the office of the SAP CEO, she was co-developing chatbots with customers like Slack.

Olteanu’s path into venture began as a favor. Scale Venture Partners was considering an investment in BigID, a company that partnered with SAP and that Olteanu knew well. She helped the firm understand what BigID had actually built. Her technical know-how caught the eye of a partner who realized the firm needed her expertise to vet the coming wave of machine-learning startups.

Scale offered her a job, and with it, a path to permanent residency. “Honestly,” she said, “that was the magic word. I joined VC for a green card.”

Building a fund for the outliers

After stints at Scale and SignalFire, Olteanu is now building a firm around the kind of drive that has defined her career.

The name Motive Force comes from physics. It’s the push or pull that causes something to move. Olteanu uses the phrase to describe founders who start building before they have permission, before anyone gives them money, and before they receive the status or applause of the market.

Jemima Meyer is one example. A South African dietitian, she taught herself to code so she could build software to screen patients for malnutrition. Olteanu met her through a women-in-tech community she runs, before Meyer had launched a formal fundraise. On one early call, Meyer told Olteanu she was pitching her company, HealthLeap, to a Los Angeles hospital and “was not leaving until they tried the product.” That drive eventually caught the attention of the broader market. Meyer landed customers like Cedars-Sinai and Penn Medicine.

This is exactly the type of founder Olteanu believes the venture ecosystem is currently failing. “I believe founders deserve a fund to exist like the one I’m designing,” she said.

Olteanu is not dismissive of the classic founder credentials. A Stanford degree, she said, can be useful. But to her, pedigree is only “a station a train passes through,” not proof of where the train is going.