Hey Product Hunt ๐
I'm Yigit, co-founder & GP of Vela Partners.
๐ Today we are excited to launch Vela Terminal.
Overview
Vela Terminal helps VCs identify growing market trends, map out relationships, and find fast-growing startups.
Our story
In 2016, we left Google to pursue deep learning to address a major global problem.
After exploring various industries, we discovered that early-stage investors who invest in innovation are not innovating in their very own businesses.
Isn't that an oxymoron?!
VCs were simply using their networks to source companies and their intuition to make investment decisions. We perceived this as suboptimal and embarked on research: how can one allocate resources in the most efficient way to the highest-impact projects in the world?
Over the years, we published 20+ pre-peer-reviewed articles and open-source machine learning models at our Github page with the collaboration of the University of Oxford.
We raised $25M and battle-tested our product by partnering with a handful of excellent VC firms and by making various outlier investments.
Our objective with this launch is to help everyone get access to a product-led, AI-native VC partner and enable others to be inspired by our research.
Our vision is to accelerate innovation. That is the only way we can advance our world and humanity.
Introducing Vela Terminal: Co-pilot for VCs
We are the world's first product-led and AI-native VC.
VC has been inherently a service business. There has been no VC out there that built a product-led strategy to scale its business so far. To the best of our knowledge, Vela Terminal is the only crazy and unconventional approach out there.
Though we built Vela Terminal to solve our own itch, other fellow VCs, entrepreneurs, and LPs find what we are building highly valuable.
Here's how this baby works:
1. Identify growing market trends
You can get a holistic view of what's growing, and identify specific ideas in markets such as developers, sustainability, and e-commerce. You can ask any question to deep dive and have a conversation.
2. Map out hidden relationships
As much as we like to automate the whole value chain, the reality is that relationships matter in startups. You can understand who invests with whom, comprehend the strength of connections, and find introduction paths to build relationships with the right people.
3. Analyze fast-growing startups
Getting a final list of soon-to-be-hot startups earlier than others is key in VC. That is exactly what our core IP signals to us. Afterward, our AI agents do the hard work of an associate to analyze, generate pros and cons, and due diligence questions, and score.
Business model
We are disrupting VC like YC did with the accelerator model and a16z did with its agency and PR model. Our model is product-led, AI-native, and open-source-first.
Our limited partners and entrepreneurs in residence get access to our premium features such as proprietary sourcing algorithms. The rest is free and open to everyone.
We consciously keep a certain fund size ($25M) to remain collaborative while being assertive and high conviction to lead with $500K-1M first checks.
Vela Terminal is just the first step toward our vision of accelerating innovation.
Please share any and all feedback. We are all ears ๐
@soleilsantoss Thank you, Soleil!
Great and deep question.
DeepMind, which is one of the pioneers of deep learning, came out from the University of Oxford. For that reason, we kept a conscious focus on the talent network of the University of Oxford. That helped us tap into a world-class and hardworking AI researcher talent.
The main challenge at the beginning was that no one believed that this was doable. Even if it was doable, it would take many years to realize that it would work. Also, we are not coming from a VC background, so it was quite difficult to break into the right networks.
Most importantly, it was extremely difficult to raise capital to execute this strategy in the early years of Vela Partners. We perhaps got more than 1,000 NOs over the years ๐
Congratulations, Yigit! I love how the Vela team is always pushing itself, its boundaries and its industry. It's inspiring you watch you work as hard, if not harder, than your founders to keep innovating and evolving. Excited to see how this develops. Congrats to the whole team.
@yigit what I mean to say is that I see this company that you are creating as a "must apply" for startups that don't know where to start since at the early stage you always have to look for as many ways as possible for your startup, to get recognized around and to seek help and guidance in how to deal with all the stages that will arise
Congrats on the launch. Looks amazing! Vela is the startup version of a VC, reinventing the space with their product-led strategy. It's inspiring to have a VC that is building and innovating itself.
Exactly what we need! Love it -- this is the smartest analyst I could ever ask for. Even better that you're solving your own issue :) Thanks for the great work Vela!
This looks great, congrats on the launch! Can you explain a little bit about how you generate the list of similar investors? Would love to know what factors go into the ratings.
@maxcameron thank you! Great question.
Co-investment data, descriptions, portfolio companies and their public interactions.
Check out one of our papers and open source code. Would love to hear how we can improve and collaborate.
https://github.com/velapartners/...
@yigit one of the ways we source investors is by looking at coinvesting. Weโll start by identifying a startup that weโre connected to and/or shares a certain characteristic with us, and look at who participated in their most recent round. Then weโll look at each of those investors and identify the other deals theyโve participated in, and see who else participated and add them to our list. It would be great to have some tooling that supports that workflow because CB certainly doesnโt!
@maxcameron that sounds like the process we used to run as well, and that is why we ended up building this algorithm. Check out `investor` or `relationships` command in the terminal. We can brainstorm after you give them a go?
@silu1243 thank you, Uday! There is a great team behind this project and many years of work.
But you know what -- LLMs are helping anyone to build software easily and faster.
The future is brighter than ever for anyone in the world who wants to build exciting projects.
@yigit Yeah, I signed up and gave it a go. Oboarding is great, then once inside, I asked a question, and it was invalid. So not 100% sure how to continue using the interface. Then, I looked through the help commands and kind of left it there for the moment.
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