After leaving Opening.io for iCIMS and spending two years on the investor side as a partner at Delta, Andreea Wade is back in the founder’s chair, and this time the photo of the month is hers.
“You always hear that there are no operators in VC. So I really thought, OK, this is what I want to do,” said Andreea Wade about her decision to join the VC company Delta Partners back in 2024. That was the plan, until November last year, when his former co-founder Adrian Mihai sent him a 3am message. He had just crunched numbers in a research paper that, in theory, solved one of AI’s invisible infrastructure problems, Wade explained.
“I leaned in a little, and I said, ‘Can I help you?’ Because that’s my thing. How can I help?” What started with a spark of interest ended with the decision to quit his new VC job with Delta Partners and return to the startup world to co-found Univec.ai with Mihai.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. When Wade joined Delta Partners as a general partner (a rarity for a partner-led firm) after exiting Opening.io, the AI talent intelligence company he co-founded with Mihai, to iCIMS, the message was clear. “These guys were saying, ‘oh it’s the job of a lifetime. You come in, of course’. Because that’s how VC works. You lift the bag, you have to be there, especially as a partner.”
He finally found it. He had done something to build. Now he was going to do the helping-others-build thing, and he was good at it. As a self-described “whispering founder” she threw herself into the role and found she had a unique insight born from sitting on the other side of the table.
“No matter what people said to me, how they said it, I knew exactly where they were, even if the words didn’t refer to anything.”
He liked to be useful. “Where I live is when founders need help. I’m like, ‘Okay, roll up your sleeves, let me help you with the promotion, the rebrand, whatever.’ But there are only so many companies a partner can get behind in any given year. So when Mihai (his twenty-year-old founder, a cool kid from his hometown who once won the Romanian national programming olympiad) came up with something that could really change the market, the whispers of the inventor would not stop.
The problem he was selling was sitting “deep, deep in the AI infrastructure”, said Wade, not visible to many, but the foundation. AI models talk about vector embedding, a layer of numbers that turns text and other content into something that machines can communicate with. Every vendor (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) has its own embedding models, each effectively speaking a different language. Worse, they are withdrawn. “Every time someone who models is killed, you have to do it all over again, just think, you have trained yourself, you paid all this money to train all the poets in the world, and a year from now, six months from now, a month from now, is equal to zero.”
Research in the real world
Until recently, the only published solutions resided in academic papers. Mihai beat them. Univec.ai now has 87-plus bridge models that translate between embedding spaces without re-embedding from scratch. They opened up a small patch, and published benchmarks and model cards for every release, in part because the market didn’t know it had this problem, Wade said.
That last part is important. When Wade showed the project to an experienced AI leader in his investor network, his reaction was immediate. You have only seen a basic research paper. He told Wade: “Andreea, 75pc of the companies in our portfolio won’t know they have this problem, but every one of them will.”
It’s the kind of “good problem with good solutions for infrastructure pioneers” that Wade and Mihai have faced before. At iCIMS, they were sitting on 600 million CVs, which Mihai processed into billions of data points.
“I remember I was building this whole marketing pitch, and Adrian was saying, ‘it’s actually billions, but don’t say billions because it sounds like gazillions, so just say billions’.” They also created one of the first vector information, before that it was a phase, and they didn’t release it. “We still had some regrets about not turning that into a company.” This time, they don’t make that mistake.
What followed for Wade was a few weeks of long travel at the end of last year, and a serious reckoning. “I was just solving in my head. I was already working. I was already there before I was. I just felt alive in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.”
So he told Mihai that he had entered. Then came the hard part – breaking it to his partners at Delta.
“I had 50 heart attacks at the same time,” he said on Monday morning. When he finally got the words out, he was surprised at the level of understanding. “They were like, ‘you have to do what you have to do, and don’t worry about anything else’.”
The resilience of immigrant founders
It’s far from Wade’s first rebuild. He arrived in Ireland 24 years ago, at the age of 23, through an inter-Chubb transfer, the only way he could have arrived here before Romania joined the EU – Wade was born in Romania to Hungarian parents. Back home, he was a senior editor at an advertising magazine. His first Irish gig was roaming the Coca-Cola warehouses in Drogheda on the night shift. “It’s raining, it’s cold, things are going wrong, I’m wandering around, I remember thinking, ‘if my friends, my parents back home, could see me, what are they like, what are you doing’? Decades later, Wade gets his Irish citizenship on June 22nd.
He’s leaned on that story before, especially in private. But the tenacity of immigrant founders is something he finds himself returning to. “You can really count on yourself. Something goes wrong? You can’t move into your parents’ house. It’s sink or swim.”
Between security work, journalism, time with an underground metal festival in Romania (Dark Bombastic Evening, or “DBE”, still active), brand curriculum at the Digital Skills Academy where the first platform Gene Murphy gave him two weeks before the launch, time as head of product at INM (Independent News and Media) and his first company called Brandism. abilities.
Common thread, he says, is able to explain complex things clearly, which is useful when your second company is building a new class of AI model that most of the market didn’t realize they needed.
And what’s next? However, Univec.ai will start the fundraising process in the next few months. The interest income is already there, Wade said. European and US funds, generalists, infrastructure specialists, and women-oriented funds. Wade is particularly interested in infrastructure professionals, given the mission of new startups. “We want to contribute,” he said. “OpenAI and others are building the basic models. There are pieces within the infrastructure where we want to make our contribution to AI.”
“We want to create a new category, and be leaders in it,” said Wade, and if you look at his and Mihai’s track record as founders, you wouldn’t bet against them. It really is a life’s work.
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