After exiting Opening.io to iCIMS and spending two years on the investor side as a partner at Delta, Andreea Wade is back in the founder seat, and this time the moonshot is hers.

“You always hear there are no operators in VC. So I really thought, ‘OK, this is what I want to do’,” says Andreea Wade about her decision to join VC firm Delta Partners back in 2024. That was the plan, until November of last year, when her former co-founder Adrian Mihai sent her a 3am message. He had just beaten the numbers on a research paper that, in theory, solved one of AI’s most invisible infrastructure problems, explains Wade.

“I leaned in a bit more, and I was like, ‘Can I help you?’ Because that’s my thing. How can I help?” What started with a spark of interest finished with the decision to drop her new VC career with Delta Partners and return to the start-up 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 at the partner-led firm) after exiting Opening.io, the AI talent intelligence company she’d built with Mihai, to iCIMS, the message was clear.

“The guys were like, ‘Oh, this is a job for life. You come in, that’s it’. Because that’s how VC works. You raise a fund, you have to be there, especially as a partner.”

Wade got it. She’d done the building thing. Now she’d do the helping-others-build thing, and she was good at it. As a self-described “founder whisperer”, she threw herself into the role and found she had a special insight born from sitting at the other side of the table.

“Regardless of what people were saying to me, how they were saying it, I knew exactly where they were, even if the words were not necessarily pointing at the thing.”

She liked being useful. “Where I come alive is when founders need help. I’m like, ‘OK, sleeves up, let me help you with the raise, with the rebrand, with whatever it is’.” But there are only so many companies a partner can get behind in any given year. So when Mihai (her co-founder of two decades, the cool kid from her hometown who once won the Romanian national programming olympiad) landed on something that might genuinely change a market, founder-whispering wasn’t going to cut it.

The problem he’d cracked sits “deep, deep in AI infrastructure”, says Wade, invisible to most, but foundational. AI models speak in vector embeddings, a layer of numbers that turns text and other content into something machines can reason about. Every vendor (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) has its own embedding models, each effectively speaking a different language. Worse, they get deprecated. “Every single time a model is killed, you have to redo it again. Imagine that. You’ve trained, you paid all this money to train on all the poetry in the world, and a year from now, six months from now, a month from now, it’s equal to zero.”

Research to real world

Until recently, the only published solutions lived in academic papers. Mihai beat them. Univec.ai now has 87-plus bridging models that translate between embedding spaces without re-embedding from scratch. They’ve open-sourced a chunk, and are publishing benchmarks and model cards for every release – partly because the market doesn’t yet know it has this problem, says Wade.

That last bit is critical. When Wade showed the work to a hugely experienced AI lead in her investor network, his reaction was immediate. He’d only ever seen the underlying research paper. He told Wade: “Andreea, 75pc of the companies in our portfolio will not know that they have this problem, but every single one of them will.”

It’s the kind of “beautiful problem with beautiful solutions for the geeks within infrastructure” that Wade and Mihai have tackled before. At iCIMS, they were sitting on 600 million CVs, which Mihai corrected to trillions of data points.

“I remember building all this kind of marketing speak, and Adrian going, ‘It’s actually trillions, but don’t say trillions because it sounds like gazillions, so just say billions’.”

They also built one of the early vector databases, before that was a category, and didn’t spin it out. “We still had a little bit of regret on not turning that into a company.” This time, they’re not making that mistake.

What followed for Wade was a few weeks of long walks at the end of last year, and an honest reckoning. “I was already solutioning in my head. I was already working. I was already there before I was there. I just felt alive in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.”

So she told Mihai she was in. Then came the hard part – breaking the news to her partners at Delta.

“I was having 50 heart attacks at the same time,” she says of the Monday morning she told them. When she finally got the words out, she was taken aback by the level of understanding. “They were like, ‘You need to do what you need to do, and don’t worry about anything else’.”

The resilience of immigrant founders

It’s far from Wade’s first reinvention. She arrived in Ireland 24 years ago, at 23, on an inter-company transfer through Chubb, the only way she could get here before Romania joined the EU – Wade was born in Romania to Hungarian parents. Back home, she had been a senior editor on an advertising magazine. Her first Irish gig was patrolling Coca-Cola warehouses in Drogheda on night shift.

“It’s raining, it’s cold, things are creaking, and I’m patrolling. I remember thinking if my friends, my parents at home, could see me, they’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’” Several decades later, Wade will get her Irish citizenship on 22 June.

She has leaned on that arrival story before, mostly privately. But the resilience of immigrant founders is something she finds herself returning to. “You genuinely can only depend on yourself. Something goes wrong? You can’t move into your parents’ house. It’s sink or swim.”

Between security work, journalism, a stint running an underground metal festival in Romania (Dark Bombastic Evening, or DBE, which still runs), the product curriculum at the Digital Skills Academy that start-up scene regular Gene Murphy handed her two weeks before launch, time as head of product at Independent News & Media and her own start-up branding consultancy called Brandalism, Wade has picked up a broad set of skills.

The common thread, she says, is being able to explain complicated things plainly, which is useful when your second company is building a new category of AI model that most of the market hasn’t realised it needs.

And what’s next? Well, Univec.ai will start a fundraising process in the next couple of months. The inbound interest is already there, says Wade, from European and US funds, generalists, infrastructure specialists and female-focused funds.

Wade is particularly interested in the infrastructure specialists, given the brand new start-up’s mission. “We want to contribute,” she says. “OpenAI and the others are building the foundational models. There are slices within infrastructure where we want to make our own contribution to AI.

“We want to build a new category, and be the leaders in it.” Given her and Mihai’s track record as founders, you would not bet against them. Job for life, indeed.

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