Fast decisions
Move fast with precision
Check size ($100K–$500K) determined by the probability of outlier success. Soft commit in 2–7 days.
Initial decision in minutes
Into the valley
The path winds down the hill…
The valley
Vela Partners · AI-native quant VC · San Francisco, since 2017
Vela Partners is an AI-native, quantitative venture capital firm.
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.
- Top-decilePerformance
- Top-decile returns. The preferred partner for category winners.
- 50+ papersResearch
- 50+ papers published. NeurIPS '25 Best Poster award.
- #1Product
- #1 Product of the Month & Day on ProductHunt.
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.
How we decide
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 portfolio
The world's first AI-only venture fund: 50+ AI companies across three funds and 10+ exits, including Limitless (Meta), WaveOne (Apple) and Promoted (Dropbox). See the portfolio.
The research
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.
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