Vela Partners

Leading quant VC: Turning art into science through AI

We back early-stage AI startups for top-decile returns. Tier-1 VCs are limited partners.

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About

Vela Partners is a leading quant VC firm based in San Francisco. We turn the art of investing into science through AI and build an AI-only portfolio since 2017.

Vela is essentially an AI startup investing in other AI startups. We are building an artificial general intelligence for venture capital. Our investor-focused products maximize our own fund’s returns, while the entrepreneur-focused self-service tools build our brand and distribution channels.

Our main investment focus is AI startups, from inception to Series A.

Manifesto

Be a 100x faster and better VC.

Innovation is at the core of progression for humanity. Inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs are the forefront players. If only we could enable entrepreneurs around the world to have everything they need to realize their idea… From a small town in Ghana, Turkey, Korea or Costa Rica… Then the world can progress much faster.

But this is not easy. We are going against the status quo like all ambitious inventors.

99.9% of the world does not have access to Silicon Valley, venture capitalists, angel investors or expert advisors. Silicon Valley is a mystery to many – one needs to tap into the right networks and know the right people to get 30 minutes of a VC. Capital and expertise are concentrated in this geography. And, VCs and other ecosystem players benefit from this concentration without taking much risk outside of SaaS and continuously controlling the media narratives.

We are obsessed with disrupting this game. We will make VC advice, expertise and guidance a commodity through continuous pursuit of research in artificial general intelligence focused on venture capital.

We are building products to scale our networks and expertise with a simple goal: help all entrepreneurs have an accessible and 7/24 available VC assistant.

We will find and fund the best entrepreneurs faster than anybody else.

Research

We carry out and publish our research in collaboration with the University of Oxford.

Maverick, idea evaluation (2022): Secilmis L.,Atta-Duncan E.,Ihlamur Y.
Proxy, predicting how investors behave (2022): Zhao R.,Wang H.,Ho T.C.,Alican F.,Ihlamur Y.
Maverick, idea evaluation using Keras (2022): Chun-Hin M.,Secilmis L.,Ihlamur Y.
Founder temporal (2023): Marsden T.,Datsomor G.,Ihlamur Y.
Atlas, market mapping using BERT (2023): Atsuta Y.,Aaronson C.,Ihlamur, Y.
Atlas, market segmentation using GPT-3 (2023): Abid A.,Aaronson C,Ihlamur, Y.
Incumbent-GPT, finding common priorities (2023): Li X,Ihlamur Y.
Company-GPT, pros and cons company analysis using self-play techniques (2023): Lou Y.,Alican F.,Ihlamur Y
Founder-GPT, Self-play to evaluate the Founder-Idea fit (2024): Xiong S.,Alican F.,Ihlamur Y.
Founder-GPT, Tree of thought for the Founder-Idea fit (2024): Papageorgiou P.,Alican F.,Ihlamur Y.
Time-series career analysis agent (2024): Vijaypurkar A.,Ihlamur Y.
Marketmap-GPT, embedding-driven prompts (2024): Lim Q.,Lee K.,Ihlamur Y.
Conversational feature engineering (2024): Harrison A.,Yin A.,Ihlamur Y.

Leadership Team

We are a global team of 20+ entrepreneurs, engineers and researchers.

Yigit Ihlamur

General Partner

Prior to Vela, Yigit Ihlamur worked on collaboration and communication products at Google, focusing on elevating human productivity.

In Mountain View, he concentrated on product-led growth (self-service signup, setup, activation, upgrade, pricing and billing flows), product strategy (Gmail, Google Domains, Chrome, Workspace reseller and marketplace products) and partnerships (website builders, domain name registrars, system integrators, resellers and startups). Prior to that, Yigit started his career at Google's European headquarters in Dublin, working on technical support helping IT admins troubleshoot and fix bugs, and building internal-support-focused productivity tools.

He received his master’s degree in computer science specializing in machine learning from the University of Oxford, and his industrial engineering degree with a focus in computer engineering from Koç University. When he is not coding or doing AI research, you can find him enjoying his time with his wife and kids, and doing outdoor sports activities such as kitesurfing, skiing, running and swimming.

Yigit is one of the founders of Vela Partners, and serves as a general partner and the Chief Technology Officer.

Portfolio

We invest in AI-native early-stage startups.