World's First Product-Led and AI-Powered VC Firm Comes Out of Stealth
SAN FRANCISCO, May 11, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Vela Partners, the world's first product-led and AI-powered venture capital firm, has emerged from stealth mode with $25 million under management and 32 portfolio companies. The company leverages AI algorithms and SaaS tactics to revitalize an industry that is ripe for transformation.
"We are thrilled to introduce our proprietary product called 'Ventech' to the world," Yigit Ihlamur, the co-founder and general partner of Vela Partners, said. "It has been developed and fine-tuned over many years by ex-Googlers and University of Oxford researchers, and features sourcing, company evaluation, relationship graph analysis, and market intelligence capabilities. Additionally, we have recently open-sourced more than 20 machine learning models at our GitHub repository, complete with research papers, to support the startup ecosystem."
To further streamline the process, Vela Partners has created a game-like terminal to assist entrepreneurs, limited partners, and other VCs in using Ventech. Entrepreneurs can analyze tendencies and fast-growing ideas in developer ecosystems like AWS and GitHub, while whitelisted VCs can identify the hottest seed-stage startups and understand emerging early-stage trends. Limited partners can ask questions using natural language about why Vela invested in a certain startup.
Vela Partners' collaborative and high-conviction investment style is proving attractive to top-talent entrepreneurs, fellow VCs, and limited partners, according to Ihlamur. While it may be too early to talk about concrete results, Vela´s portfolio shows preliminary signs of outlier performance.
Portfolio companies like Grabango ($93 million raised), which is helping grocers run autonomous checkout stores, and Bear Robotics ($115 million raised), which is addressing labor shortages by developing self-driving robots for the hospitality industry, are illustrative examples. Initially detected by Vela's Ventech at a pre-revenue seed stage, these companies are growing rapidly, solving real-world problems, and generating significant revenues.
Similar to the team composition of Vela Partners, more than half of its portfolio companies are founded by ex-Googlers. Vela is taking a conscious and focused approach in building and nurturing an active network of ex-Googlers, which is one of the world's top AI talent pools.
Finally, limited partners have been an important part of Vela's ecosystem, including institutional investors like banks, manufacturing companies, energy firms and system integrators that are interested in applying AI to their businesses. LPs, such as founders, C-level executives, and product and engineering leaders of technology companies and financial institutions, participate in portfolio support.
"Vela Partners is essentially a machine learning startup that happens to invest in other startups," affirmed Fuat Alican, another co-founder and managing director at Vela Partners. "After years of pioneering efforts, we are approaching our ultimate goal, which is for AI and automation to touch and manage all aspects of our business. We are among the best prepared in the world for what we see as an inflection point in AI."
Source: Vela Partners
