Into the valley
The path winds down the hill…
Vela Partners · AI-native quant VC · San Francisco, since 2017
We fund AI founders in days, not months.
- Seed checks
- $100K–$500K
- Soft commit
- 2–7 days
- Stage
- Inception → Series A
- Focus
- AI only, since 2017
We fund AI founders in days, not months: seed checks of $100K to $500K, with soft commits in 2 to 7 days, from inception through Series A. Vela has invested only in AI since it was founded in 2017, in San Francisco.
Performance
Top-decile
Top-decile returns. The preferred partner for category winners.
Research
50+ papers
50+ papers published. NeurIPS '25 Best Poster award.
Product
#1
#1 Product of the Month & Day on ProductHunt.
What founders get
Fast decisions
Move fast with precision
Check size determined by the probability of outlier success.
Initial decision in minutes
Intros that matter
Customers and follow-on capital
Direct introductions to tier-1 VCs, banks, tech giants, manufacturing, and energy firms.
5–100 introductions per company
Oxford Research
AI research together
Access frontier AI research expertise from Vela Research and the University of Oxford network.
Publish research. Hire top talent.
Every founder and company is scored with probability models, not argued over. V, the AI partner at the centre of Vela OS, runs sourcing, diligence and portfolio work with specialised agents, and major LPs work inside the same system.
The world's first AI-only venture fund: 50+ AI companies across three funds and 10+ exits. See the portfolio
50+ papers with the University of Oxford on LLMs with verifiable methods for high-stakes decisions, including a Best Poster at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Generative AI in Finance. Read the research
Entrepreneur OS tells you in minutes whether YC, a16z or Sequoia would invest. Free, whether or not Vela does.
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