A Team Sport
The people who built Vela.
Venture capital is often told as the story of a single partner with taste. Vela is not that firm. Every investment decision, every published paper, every product shipped, every model trained is the work of many people across San Francisco, New York, London, Oxford, Switzerland, Spain, Turkiye, Ghana, China, and Japan. Their names are below, because the work, and the credit, belongs to them.
50+Papers & Patents
10+Years of Research
100+Contributors
The Roster
Everyone who has contributed to building Vela since 2017: general partners, committees, advisors, fellows, technical staff, and the research community at Oxford and collaborating institutions. Listed alphabetically.
- Aarav ShrimankerOxford researcherMulti-layer probabilistic pattern mining with adaptive confidence networks.
- Aaron Ontoyin YinMember of Technical StaffGhana Math Olympiad, GPTree, Think-Reason-Learn, models and sourcing.
- Abdullah AbidOxford researcherAutomated market segmentation with vector space clustering.
- Afriyie Kwesi SamuelMember of Technical StaffTop graduate. Vela OS, frontend intelligence.
- Aikins LaryeaMember of Technical StaffTop hacker. Agent fleets and agentic predictions.
- Aldair PetroniliaOxford researcherFoundations of founder prediction with EDA and ML.
- Alex GonzalezEiR & AdvisorSuccessful entrepreneur. Google. Oxford.
- Anirudh Jaidev MaheshOxford researcherVerifiable reasoning, LLM code generation.
- Anna BatorOxford researcherPerformance of structured and reasoned features.
- Anushka SuyalOxford researcherExtended level segmentation.
- Ashmit RaoOxford researcherDisambiguating reasoned features with an option to pick an in-between decision.
- Ayan VijaypurkarOxford researcherLLM-driven career growth analysis.
- Ben GriffinResearch ScientistOxford PhD, leading research. Random Rule Forest and Think-Reason-Learn.
- BetoFellowCIO, San Diego Housing Commission.
- Bob Van WindenExecutive AdvisorCOO, Bridge (Stripe). Google.
- Bogdan Andrei BabanOxford researcherMulti-ML model and sensitivity analysis.
- Cagan YanmazOxford researcherCo-investor modeling.
- Charlie AaronsonLPAC & Venture PartnerMeta, Google. Oxford.
- Chloe ChanOxford researcherImpact of social interactions.
- Chuck BralverLPACCo-founder of Oliver Wyman.
- Chun Hin MaOxford researcherDescription-driven predictions.
- Diego Vidaurre HencheOxford researcherInterpretable rule ensembles.
- Eduard OravkinOxford researcherPageRank for investors.
- Eli KoenCo-founder & AdvisorUBP, Goldman Sachs.
- Eoin DonohoeFellowAnthropic, Stripe, Google.
- Ethan LiOxford researcherAlpha decay.
- Fuat AlicanCo-founder & General PartnerNetsis, Citi, Salomon Brothers. PhD, Universidad Latina.
- Grace SodunkeOxford researcherTime-machine features.
- Halit ErdoganFellowEngineering leader, Google.
- Hao LiOxford researcherLLM-based feature engineering.
- Hasan Ugur KoyluogluLPAC & Quantitative CommitteePartner and Vice Chair, Oliver Wyman. Former professor. PhD, Princeton.
- Hengyu WangOxford researcherNaive Bayes model with ML.
- Hristo EfimovOxford researcherKnowledge graph agent.
- Ian CheungOxford researcherSBERT-based similarity search.
- Ipek SahbazogluOxford researcherKnowledge graph with graph convolutional networks.
- Jack PreuveneersOxford researcherOxford PhD, reasoned rule mining and portfolio construction.
- Jimmy RippinOxford researcherCrunchbase-focused sourcing agent.
- Jirko RubruckOxford researcherTemporal features.
- Joel BeazleyOxford researcherStability-aware integration of LLM-derived feature families.
- John DrzikQuantitative CommitteeFormer President of Marsh & CEO of Oliver Wyman. PhD, Princeton.
- Johnny LiangOxford researcherAutoresearch on VCBench.
- Joseph TernaskyQuantitative CommitteeEngineering executive. Carta, Splunk, Google, Meta, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple.
- Jude PophamOxford researcherFounder archetypes with Graph Neural Networks.
- Julia DabrowskaOxford researcherMarket-focused reflective LLMs for idea prediction.
- Julianna PiskorzOxford researcherInvestor similarities.
- Junyan WangOxford researcherLLM-driven founding team synergies.
- Kazuki NotsuSenior AdvisorCo-founder and GP, GE Partners. Incubate Fund, Google, BCG.
- Kelvin AmoabaMember of Technical StaffTop graduate. Architect of V and Taste model, leading infrastructure.
- Kensei SakamotoOxford researcherProbabilistic modeling of venture capital portfolio outliers.
- Leona Renard KouameOxford researcherSourcing agent for YC.
- Liren SongOxford researcherWord2vec for the startup language.
- Luka SecilmisETH Zurich & EPFLBERT-based idea prediction.
- Matthew BuckleyOxford researcherIdea clustering.
- Maximilian WestermannOxford researcherLLM-based feature discovery, CoFEE.
- Mihir KumarOxford researcherRare-event prediction, ensemble learning.
- Mirsaid AbdullahOxford researcherIntegrating knowledge graphs, community detection, and linear models for outlier detection.
- Moncef SlimaniOxford researcherUnsupervised explained ensemble clustering model for founder persona characterization.
- Murat IhlamurCo-founder & AdvisorSuccessful enterprise software entrepreneur, Netsis.
- Nathan LiOxford researcherOptimal stop-loss.
- Omer BayatliLPACManaging Director, Citi.
- Peiren WangOxford researcherPosition sizing and autoresearch.
- Prabhav DesaiOxford researcherLarge founder model v0.
- Raymond ZhaoOxford researcherInvestor-focused SVM.
- Rick ChenOxford researcherOxford PhD, AGI benchmarks focused on VCBench.
- Sameer SinghUniversity of MichiganReasoning-based predictions.
- Satyam AgarwalOxford researcherSearch engine-based sourcing agent.
- Sichao XiongOxford researcherGPTree, LLM-powered decision trees.
- Silei ZhuOxford researcherExplainable classification via fine-tuned LLM embeddings.
- Sinan AkcaliOxford researcherWord embeddings as feature generation.
- Te PeiOxford researcherHierarchical clustering, founder personas.
- Tom MarsdenOxford researcherFounder trajectory.
- Xianling MuOxford researcherPolicy induction, in-context learning.
- Xingzhe LiOxford researcherIncumbent priority identification for competition.
- Xisen WangOxford researcherMulti-agent framework, SSFF.
- Xun HuOxford researcherGNNs for startup prediction.
- Yagiz IhlamurAdvisorPHBench, Senior PM Amazon.
- Yashkanwar DadwalOxford researcherFounder network score.
- Yigit IhlamurCo-founder & General PartnerGoogle, Oxford.
- Yizhang LouOxford researcherMulti-agent VC.
- Yuhang YeOxford researcherOxford PhD, RL environments.
- Yunqi LiangOxford researcherDeal-level correlation, portfolio construction.
- Yusuke AtsutaOxford researcherBERT-powered automated market map.
- Zakari SalifuMember of Technical StaffAI Master at Kaggle, Vela large-scale data index and ML.
- Zejun FengOxford researcherMirrored verification, multi-agent rating.
- Zhaozhou ChenOxford researcherInvestor segmentation with graph-based modeling.