@MotiveForce

Pre-seed & seed firm for founders who build before anyone asks. Backing Beautiful Software that amplifies human agency. GP: @oanaolt

San Francisco
Joined September 2007
Tomorrow, Sept 23 @ 12 pm ET, join us for the #ACMTechTalk #AMA w/Investor/M: Engineer @oanaolt, founder @MotiveForce. She'll focus on tech people are building before they have obvious categories & what becomes possible when the primitives change. Reg: bit.ly/4y8HVn8
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MotiveForce retweeted
My product team showed me this tiny little feature this morning, and it sparked so much joy. Ask Soffi “what colors are on this page?” and she shows you the actual design tokens inline. Click one, and it takes you right to it in the design system. We think a lot about how chat and the rest of the product should feel completely integrated, not like two separate experiences. It’s such a small thing, but these little details add up.
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Oana Olteanu says Folk Computer proves why venture firms should fund pre-market computing research. A Brooklyn demo turned paper into a running program. @MotiveForce makes the case for research-first investing. tinyurl.com/3x83he2x
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MotiveForce retweeted
A company running AI agents at scale generates 70 Wikipedias of text per month, roughly 500 years of continuous reading. Every failure is in there. Almost nobody reads it. Not because they don't care. Because the tools don't exist yet. Traditional observability was built for metrics. This is a data engineering problem. Agent traces are megabytes of nested unstructured text. You can't dashboard your way to understanding why an agent went off the rails. @platypii is speaking at @databricks on exactly this. His company @hyperparamapp is worth finding if you operate agents in production. Full blogpost below 👇
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🤖 Made with AI
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MotiveForce retweeted
and if you're wondering where my hand goes a the start of the video, it's because the office dog came by and could not resist saying hi to Mahina even during an interview
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white paper here soffi.ai/how-soffi-works
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In this interview I talk about "Beautiful Software", but what is it? "𝗕𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲" doesn't rely on flashy marketing, trendy UI tricks, or bloated features to convince the user of its value. The beauty is baked into its foundational architecture, its coherence, and its rigorous alignment with user needs. 𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲. A Motive Force backed company, Soffi just published their architectural white paper. Right now, a designer on your team filed a ticket to change a button label. An engineer will pick it up in three days, configure a local environment, make the change, and send a screenshot for review. Soffi cuts that entire chain. Your whole application spins up live in the browser. A PM points at a component, describes what they want, and an embedded agent makes the change against the real codebase, with tests and type-checking running as it works. A pull request goes into normal review. 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, and with it, entire categories of work that should never have existed in the first place. 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗣𝗠𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗱𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄. Your designers wait days to see a copy change in context. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵, 𝘀𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗴𝗼 𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱. ̲𝚂̲𝚘̲𝚏̲𝚏̲𝚒̲ ̲𝚛̲𝚎̲𝚖̲𝚘̲𝚟̲𝚎̲𝚜̲ ̲𝚝̲𝚑̲𝚊̲𝚝̲ ̲𝚌̲𝚘̲𝚜̲𝚝̲. Ask yourself how much of your team's velocity is being eaten by a process that predates the tools you now have. Read how they built it below in the comments 👇
Replying to @crisdobbins
@crisdobbins our founder and CEO in conversation with @oanaolt founder of @motiveforce_ai and an investor in Soffi
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I'm alive!
Today we're launching @soffi_dev. I spent most of my career shaping products but relying on others to build them. Then AI changed that. Soffi lets designers and PMs work directly on real, deployed software alongside engineers. Not mockups. Not prototypes. The actual product.
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Motive Force is a proud backer of @crisdobbins and her dream @soffi_dev more words from the founder here open.substack.com/pub/crisdo…
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Most software makes meetings easier. The interesting software makes them unnecessary. Try this amazing product here soffi.ai
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MotiveForce retweeted
See what Soffi can do. Watch this product demo, by our founder & CEO @crisdobbins
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MotiveForce retweeted
Today we're launching @soffi_dev. I spent most of my career shaping products but relying on others to build them. Then AI changed that. Soffi lets designers and PMs work directly on real, deployed software alongside engineers. Not mockups. Not prototypes. The actual product.
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Motive Force is a pre-seed and seed firm for founders who build before anyone asks. The inner drive that sustains motion through uncertainty. We back Beautiful Software that amplifies human agency: technically rigorous, designed around real workflows, priced in alignment with the value it creates. A lot of AI companies today are optimized for demos. We are looking for systems that become infrastructure. @poolsideai, @maintainx, @inngest, HealthLeap AI, @soffi_dev. Each one a founder I believed in before the category was obvious. Too early, too obsessed, too deep into a problem without a clean name yet? oana@motiveforce.ai
This happened Business Insider named me to the Seed 40 list of best women early-stage investors of 2026. Still processing it.
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MotiveForce retweeted
If you’re thinking about raising money for your start-up, you should talk to Oana! N of 1.
What I look for in founders @MotiveForce Also kudos to the VP of Eng at Duolingo for giving me his Twitter handle :) and the founder who brokered the intro If you feel seen, I want to talk
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The LyricWiki API just turned 2 years old yesterday! http://lyricwiki.org/LyricWiki:SOAP