ABOUT

I'm Bogdan Cristei, an investor-operator in real-world AI, based in San Francisco. Time and attention are the most valuable things I have, and OPTIM is how I choose who to spend them with. Today it's three things.

OPTIM Circle is a community of 200 founders, operators, and investors building in real-world AI: builders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Waymo and others on one side, investors from 60 funds on the other, and monthly gatherings in San Francisco where the two sides meet. When a company in the room raises, this is where the round picks up momentum. When one hires, this is where the shortlist starts.

The OPTIM Update is the newsletter and podcast: real-world AI, automation, robotics, industrial systems, and the infrastructure underneath them, told mostly by the founders building it.

And OPTIM is an angel fund: checks into founders I get to know through the community, written alongside funds I trust. 35 companies backed so far, alongside Sequoia, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Khosla, and many others, with over $1 billion raised by the portfolio.

For a few of those companies at a time, the check is where the work starts. I help them scale from pre-seed to Series A: raising the rounds, hiring the executives, landing the first customers, and the smaller things in between. My own capital is in every one of them. How that works: www.bogdancristei.com

Before venture, I spent seven years as an industrial and systems engineer, commissioning control systems and plant startups for clients like Emerson Electric, Genentech and Broadcom. Systems that had to work in production. Founders trust me because we speak the same engineering language.

What Founders Say

As we refined the idea behind Alterego, Bogdan provided helpful perspective from the very beginning. His encouragement and feedback during our first pitch practices were invaluable, and he later introduced us to the investor who went on to lead our round.

Max Newlon, Founder & CEO of Alterego

He helped us significantly during our seed fundraise, including introducing us to our lead investor, and remains a valuable sounding board for major decisions. He’s one of the few people who have materially influenced the trajectory of our company, and I would strongly recommend any technical founder to work with him.

Gary Chen, Founder & CEO of Raise Robotics

Bogdan wrote one of our early checks and then went to work. He helped us blow up our round, brought investors to the table, and pushed on the technical story until it was tight. I have sent other founders his way since.

Freeman Irabaruta, Co-Founder & CEO of Unit Zero

More founder perspectives at optim.vc/testimonials.