She became a VC for a green card. Now she's backing billion-dollar AI bets.

Oana Olteanu declined a job at Poolside and instead kept investing. After impressing Poolside’s founder, she was offered a personal investment opportunity rather than joining the venture firm. She wrote a small personal check to Poolside, which later reached a $12 billion valuation. That outcome supported her next step: launching her seed firm, Motive Force. Motive Force backs early-stage startups, especially at pre-seed and seed rounds, across artificial intelligence, enterprise software, and robotics. The firm aims to identify technical outsiders and overlooked founders before broader Silicon Valley attention arrives. Olteanu believes capital is clustering into mega-rounds, creating room for smaller, faster investors who find founders early, often before they seek formal funding.

"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."

"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."

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