Productizing venture capital.
Vela Partners builds products. Not as a side project, but as the central work of the firm. We are productizing our expertise and our network so that we can build relationships with as many entrepreneurs as possible, not just the ones who happen to walk through our door.
#1 Product of the Day#1 Productivity Product of the Monthon Product HuntWhy Vela builds products
Traditional VC is a relationship business that does not scale. Decisions happen in closed rooms. Advice is bespoke. The value a firm creates beyond capital is usually locked inside individual partners’ heads. The result is an industry where a small set of firms holds most of the operating knowledge, and access is rationed by who you know.
Vela is productizing VC. We turn the components of our own work into software that anyone can use, and we ship it. Relationships still matter to us, and we still build them deliberately. The difference is that we are building them at scale, with founders and ecosystem partners we would never reach inside the traditional VC model. There are three reasons we do this.
We productize our own work as a VC. When we productize VC, we operate thousands of partners and analysts at scale, having conversations with and helping millions of entrepreneurs around the world. Quant VC at Vela means treating venture capital as a software discipline, not a craft passed down inside a firm.
We productize our partnership with our LPs. Vela OS is the world’s top VC operating system. Our major LPs use it to invest directly, with our infrastructure underneath them. Vela becomes the platform layer rather than the gatekeeper, and our LPs become first-class operators rather than passive capital.
We productize ecosystem enablement. Every product we build for founders is free or open-source. They lower the barrier to starting a company, give founders honest signal earlier, and put research-grade tools in the hands of teams that could never otherwise afford them. We believe a healthy ecosystem produces better founders, and better founders produce better returns.
This is consistent with what we already believe about AI more broadly. If AI is reshaping medicine, law, credit, and every other expert-judgment domain, venture capital is no exception. We have applied that conviction to ourselves since Day 1 of the firm. From inception, we have perceived ourselves as an AI startup investing in other AI startups.
For the research and methodology behind these products, see our research program, the VCBench benchmark, and the Think-Reason-Learn framework.
For Vela and our LPs
The core platform that runs the firm and gives our LPs direct access to invest.
Vela OS
Vela OS handles our deal flow, company analysis, portfolio support, and research. Vela is the only firm building this much VC infrastructure in the open and shipping it as products.
For aspiring founders
Tools for the moment before you fully commit, when you are still deciding whether to go, what to work on, and whether Vela could back you.
Founder Readiness
A psychometric self-assessment for prospective founders, applying Paul Graham's Founder Mode principles. Take it before you commit. Get an honest read on your own readiness across personality, decision-making style, and operational instincts. Receive personalized coaching insights about where to focus, drawn from a methodology developed with experienced founder coaches. Free.
AI Theses
A live map of where AI is most likely to reshape the labor market, plus concrete startup ideas in the most exposed categories. We combined US Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation data with Andrej Karpathy's open-source AI susceptibility framework, then generated investable theses inside each category. If you are looking for a high-conviction direction grounded in real labor data rather than vibes, start here. Free.
Entrepreneur OS
Get a Vela investment decision in minutes. Submit your company through Entrepreneur OS and receive a structured evaluation against the same quant VC models we use internally for our own deal flow. Faster than any traditional pitch process, with transparent decision logic. Founders no longer need to wait weeks for a meeting to find out whether Vela is the right partner.
For founders building
Tools for after you've started, when you are running a company and need operational leverage.
Vela Coach
Open-source coaching from your meeting transcripts. Vela Coach ingests transcripts from your sales calls, team meetings, fundraising conversations, and one-on-ones, and provides structured guidance on goals, fundraising, team management, and sales. Privacy is the constraint we built around: the tool is open-source and designed to keep your data local rather than handing it to a third-party SaaS. The same coaching infrastructure we use to support our own portfolio is now usable by any founder.
Cairn
Open-source end-to-end test agent for AI-generated code. Once your Claude Code session is complete, you still need to rigorously verify what was built before shipping to customers. Cairn runs the full test surface, catches the bugs that AI-assisted development tends to introduce, and gives you the confidence to ship. Battle-tested internally on every Vela product, which is why our products work. Open-source and free.
For breakthrough research
Scientific Research Agents
Available for portfolio
Internal agents and skills that let small teams pursue scientific research at the scale of large labs. This is the engine behind Vela's research output: peer-reviewed papers with the University of Oxford, patent filings, and benchmarks like VCBench. The agents handle literature review, experiment design, statistical analysis, and paper drafting, freeing researchers to focus on the ideas that matter. The same stack is available to our portfolio companies that need to publish, file IP, or push the frontier in their domains.