Today I had the privilege of interviewing Yiğit Ihlamur, co-founder and general partner of San Francisco company Vela Partners. Vela Partners has just closed its first fund on a mission to invest exclusively in his AI startups.
What a breath of fresh air in his story!
From day one, Yiğit said his goal was to invest in startups focused on AI, data and developers. He and his team are on a mission to find and fund the fastest and best entrepreneurs on the planet.
It all started with our partners’ passion for accelerating innovation, but they don’t really have the skills to use data science or AI in their own business, or they don’t really have the skills to design, build, and deliver real AI projects. They were shocked to see how many VCs had never done it. He said.
I very much agree with Yiğit’s comment. His experience in AI, data, and software development at SalesChoice made him realize this. Investors are adept at sensing talent and financial metrics, but often overlook longer timeframes when scaling more complex AI companies. A software business model that requires multi-model AI capabilities as a panacea premise is a pretty straightforward premise in the AI industry. AI is often messy, and it takes the best AI/ML talent pool to build and commercialize AI intelligent software and build scalable architectures.
Almost 24 months later, Yiğit and his partners today announced that they have created a total investment pool of $25 million, raised $20 million, and have gone through an early fund POC. At this stage, he already has 32 investors across the two funds and plans to invest in 10 more startups over the next 12 months. They typically invest $500,000 to he $1.5 million check size and maintain collaboration by co-investing with other parties. The company is run by his eight full-time employees, who have already set their sights on setting up a larger fund…and based on Mr. Yiğit’s energy and passion, I am convinced that his We are confident that the vision will come true.
some more background
What makes Vela Partners so unique is that they also have their own product called ‘Ventech’ which has been developed and fine-tuned over the years by former Googlers and Oxford University researchers. Also sourcing, company valuation, relationship graph analysis, and market intelligence capabilities. Additionally, the company recently open sourced more than 20 of his machine learning models complete with research papers on his Github repository to support the startup ecosystem. “
To further streamline the process, Vela Partners has created a game-like terminal to help entrepreneurs, limited partners and other VCs use Ventech. Entrepreneurs can analyze trends and fast-growing ideas in developer ecosystems such as AWS and Github, and whitelisted VCs can identify the hottest seed-stage startups and launch new early-stage startups. You can understand the trend of the stages. Limited partners can use natural language to ask why Vela invested in a particular startup.
According to the company, Vela Partners’ collaborative and principled investment style has proven attractive to talented entrepreneurs, VC peers and limited partners. It may be too early to talk about concrete results, but Vela’s portfolio shows preliminary signs of anomalous performance.
Grabango ($93 million raised), which supports the operation of automated cash registers in grocery stores, and Bear Robotics ($115 million raised), which addresses labor shortages by developing self-driving robots for the hospitality industry. Portfolio companies such as
First discovered by Vela’s Ventech in the pre-profit stage, these companies have grown rapidly, solving real-world problems and generating significant revenue.
Similar to the team composition at Vela Partners, more than half of the portfolio companies are founded by former Googlers. Vela takes a conscious and focused approach in building and cultivating an active network of former Googlers, one of his world-class AI talent pools. Finally, Limited Partners are an important part of Vela’s ecosystem, including organizations.
Vela Partners’ market outlook and timing couldn’t be better, as AI continues to be the focus of investors, especially in generative AI business models.
VCs are steadily increasing their position in generative AI, from $408 million in 2018 to $4.8 billion in 2021 and $4.5 billion in 2022, according to a Pitchbook report released this month. there is Angel and seed deals have grown similarly, with 107 deals and $358.3. In 2018, just $41 million and he had $102.8 million invested, but in 2022 he has $1 million invested. And AI as a whole continues to power the world’s most innovative software companies. According to Next Move Strategy Consulting, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to show significant growth over the next decade. Its value of nearly US$100 billion is expected to increase 20-fold to nearly US$2 trillion by 2030.
Vela Partners takes a very unique and fresh approach to becoming a venture capitalist, with a collaborative leadership style driven by Yiğit Ihlamur, co-founder and general partner of Vela Partners.
He’s a kind-hearted venture capitalist – and this may seem like a contradiction – but the AI software companies that Vela Partners invests in are more than just the edge of technological innovation he’s most interested in. I doubt not. Listening is a passion for what drives entrepreneurs to act, and listening to them.
It takes courage, dedication, and finally a VC that puts collaboration at the heart of everything they do, to stand up every day and fight their way through the mud.
Go Vela Partners Go and spread positive pollen everywhere. Our tech industry needs more human advantage and emotional intelligence.
How refreshing is this?
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