Startups

‘AI-powered’ VC firm Vela emerges from stealth with $25M under management

Comment

The world of big data is seen in this complex and vibrantly colored visual representation of data.
Image Credits: John Lund / Getty Images

Six years ago, Yiğit Ihlamur, a former senior program manager at Google, observed that AI was surpassing human capabilities in certain areas — at least by his estimation. Equipped with this perspective, he looked into various sectors with the goal of tackling a problem that he could work on for the rest of his life.

“At an abstract level, I was intrigued by the idea of accelerating innovation, because innovation creates new products, services and experiences that were previously unimaginable,” Ihlamur told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I perceived delivering capital to innovation as a math problem and started coding and hacking my way in.”

Ihlamur decided to focus on the VC space, which he saw as behind in terms of leveraging automation and AI. With the help of several co-founders, he launched Vela Partners, a VC firm that he describes as “AI-powered” and “product-led.”

Vela is an early-stage VC with $25 million under management and 32 portfolio companies, including self-checkout startup Grabango and robotics firm Bear Robotics. Like all VCs, Vela determines — partly using predictive algorithms — new investment areas as it attempts to identify trends, source the right opportunities and suss out threats to its existing investments.

To train its predictive algorithms, Vela draws on websites and social networks for data, also leveraging paid datasets like Crunchbase.

“Vela provides market intelligence and insights of innovative ideas; hence technical decision makers can decide which tools to buy or build to grow their core businesses,” Ihlamur said. “Models must be informative and explanatory. Ultimately our approach marries AI with expert heuristics.”

Inevitably, of course, algorithms amplify the biases in the data on which they’re trained — and this can have major consequences in the VC realm. In an experiment in November 2020, Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that an investment recommendation algorithm tended to pick white entrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs of color and preferred investing in startups with male founders. Experts uncovered similar issues with CB Insights’ Mosaic tool, which uses proxies for race, socioeconomic status, gender and disability to determine a person’s likelihood of success.

Ihlamur somewhat dodged questions around bias, acknowledging that it comes with the territory — but not necessarily offering a solution.

“A model can learn the biases of other VCs or biases of the past,” he said. “First, one needs to understand the underlying reason why these behaviors occurred in the venture market. Second, every problem is unique, and a generalized approach cannot work for everything.”

Bias issues aside, Bay Area–based Vela isn’t the first to develop algorithmic tools to inform its investment decisions. VC firms, including SignalFire, EQT Ventures and Nauta Capital, are using AI-powered platforms to flag potential top picks.

The differentiator for Vela, according to Ihlamur, is its “game-like” terminal built to assist entrepreneurs, limited partners and other VCs in using its services. Entrepreneurs can analyze tendencies in developer ecosystems like Amazon Web Services and GitHub, while whitelisted VCs can spot (with any luck) promising seed-stage startups and limited partners can ask questions about why Vela invested in a particular startup.

Vela’s GitHub repo, which includes its algorithmic models, is public — both for inspection and reuse.

“While some VCs may be experimenting with AI-based sourcing, we haven’t seen any VC taking a product-led approach,” Ihlamur said. “Anyone can go to Vela’s website and use our product. We’re building relationships with entrepreneurs and limited partners in a programmatic way — our ultimate goal is for AI and automation to touch and manage all aspects of our business.”

It’s an approach that’s worked well for Vela so far. The firm claims to be running at “break-even” level, leading or co-leading $500,000 to $1.5 million check sizes.

In the near term, Vela plans to invest mainly in AI, data and developer-focused startups. Ihlamur expressed enthusiasm for generative AI specifically, a market that could be worth $51.8 billion by 2028 — depending on which sources you believe.

“The pandemic had a positive impact on our business, as was the case for many other venture capital firms,” Ihlamur said. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s release provided further tailwinds for us as an AI-powered VC firm … With respect to the broader slowdown in tech, we’re not concerned as we’re break-even as a company and have capital to invest. Despite the slowdown, there are significant opportunities to seize partially thanks to the rapid progress in AI.”

More TechCrunch

Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has…

Indian EV startup Zypp Electric secures ENEOS backing to fund expansion to Southeast Asia

Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood,…

A venture capital firm looks back on changing norms, from board seats to backing rival startups

The families of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are suing Activision and Meta, as well as gun manufacturer Daniel Defense. The families bringing the…

Families of Uvalde shooting victims sue Activision and Meta

Like most Silicon Valley VCs, what Garry Tan sees is opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan supports some AI regulation but warns against AI monopolies

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the…

How Maven’s AI-run ‘serendipity network’ can make social media interesting again

Miriam Vogel, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is the CEO of the nonprofit responsible AI advocacy organization EqualAI.

Women in AI: Miriam Vogel stresses the need for responsible AI

Google has been taking heat for some of the inaccurate, funny, and downright weird answers that it’s been providing via AI Overviews in search. AI Overviews are the AI-generated search…

What are Google’s AI Overviews good for?

When it comes to the world of venture-backed startups, some issues are universal, and some are very dependent on where the startups and its backers are located. It’s something we…

The ups and downs of investing in Europe, with VCs Saul Klein and Raluca Ragab

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. OpenAI announced this week that…

Scarlett Johansson brought receipts to the OpenAI controversy

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

pcTattletale’s website was briefly defaced and contained links containing files from the spyware maker’s servers, before going offline.

Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced

Featured Article

Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Synapse’s bankruptcy shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. 

2 days ago
Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Sarah Myers West, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is managing director at the AI Now institute.

Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI and publishers are partners of convenience

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well,…

Startups Weekly: Drama at Techstars. Drama in AI. Drama everywhere.

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…

From Plaid to Figma, here are the startups that are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Federal safety regulators have discovered nine more incidents that raise questions about the safety of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles operating in Phoenix and San Francisco.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

Terra One’s pitch deck has a few wins, but also a few misses. Here’s how to fix that.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Terra One’s $7.5M Seed deck

Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI policy and governance in the Global South.

Women in AI: Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI’s impact on the Global South

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. While the event is a few months away, the deadline to secure your early-bird tickets and save up to $800…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird tickets fly away next Friday

Another week, and another round of crazy cash injections and valuations emerged from the AI realm. DeepL, an AI language translation startup, raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation;…

Big tech companies are plowing money into AI startups, which could help them dodge antitrust concerns

If raised, this new fund, the firm’s third, would be its largest to date.

Harlem Capital is raising a $150 million fund

About half a million patients have been notified so far, but the number of affected individuals is likely far higher.

US pharma giant Cencora says Americans’ health information stolen in data breach

Attention, tech enthusiasts and startup supporters! The final countdown is here: Today is the last day to cast your vote for the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program. Voting closes…

Last day to vote for TC Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program

Featured Article

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Among other things, Whittaker is concerned about the concentration of power in the five main social media platforms.

3 days ago
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Lucid Motors is laying off about 400 employees, or roughly 6% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring ahead of the launch of its first electric SUV later this…

Lucid Motors slashes 400 jobs ahead of crucial SUV launch

Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as…

Google invests $350 million in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart

A Jio Financial unit plans to purchase customer premises equipment and telecom gear worth $4.32 billion from Reliance Retail.

Jio Financial unit to buy $4.32B of telecom gear from Reliance Retail

Foursquare, the location-focused outfit that in 2020 merged with Factual, another location-focused outfit, is joining the parade of companies to make cuts to one of its biggest cost centers –…

Foursquare just laid off 105 employees