Andreea Wade, Univec.ai. Image: Andy Davies/Celtic Photography.
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.”
