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A traveller sitting on a ridge at dawn, a spyglass to his eye, looking out over a valley of flat-topped mesas, a river and a village

Deploying AI Fund IIBacked by Tier-1 VCs

We fund AI founders in days, not months.

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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.

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.

Seed checks
$100K–$500K
Soft commit
2–7 days
Stage
Inception → Series A
Focus
AI only, since 2017
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

Everything a founder needs, in days.

  1. Fast decisions

    Move fast with precision

    Check size determined by the probability of outlier success.

    Initial decision in minutes

  2. 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

  3. Oxford Research

    AI research together

    Access frontier AI research expertise from Vela Research and the University of Oxford network.

    Publish research. Hire top talent.

Inside Vela

How we decide, who we back, what we publish.

  1. A painted wooden workshop on a hilltop with smoke rising from the chimney

    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.

  2. Painted yurts and tents inside a wooden fence on a summer field

    The portfolio

    The world's first AI-only venture fund: 50+ AI companies across three funds and 10+ exits.

    See the portfolio
  3. A painted timber house with lit windows on a cliff at dusk

    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

Entrepreneur OS tells you in minutes whether YC, a16z or Sequoia would invest. Free, whether or not Vela does.

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An AI-native, quantitative venture capital firm. San Francisco, since 2017.