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p/vela-terminalCo-pilot for VCs
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Yigit Ihlamur

Vela Terminal - Co-pilot for VCs

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Vela Terminal helps VCs identify growing market trends, map out relationships, and find fast-growing startups.

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Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
📌
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Yigit, co-founder & GP of Vela Partners. 🚀 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 👂
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@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 😅
Yasser Ansari
I appreciate how Vela is pushing the envelope and helping redefine what a VC is and should be. Looking forward to exploring the terminal more!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@futurewilds Thank you Yasser! Looking forward to hearing your feedback after you deep dive into the product.
Dustin O'Dell
Excited about what Yigit and team have been building. Look forward to using it to help our own efforts. Congrats!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@dustin_o_dell absolutely, Dustin! We can brainstorm further.
Kusum Chanrai
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 Ihlamur
Maker
@kusum_chanrai1 Thank you so much for your kind words, partnership, and support 🙏🙏
Maclean Earle
Love this product!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@maclean_earle Thank you Maclean! :)
that's a "must have applied" for startup at early stage as at those stages you must look for anything related you can find
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@gobinx_account I did not understand - can you please elaborate further?
@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
Halit Erdogan
Maker
One of the best use cases for Generative AI!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@halit_erdogan it's been incredibly fun to complement our existing models with generative AI!
eoin donohoe
This is an incredible product and company. Well done to everyone involved.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@eoin_donohoe thank you for being part of the journey, Eoin!
Durgé Seerden
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.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@dsdeur thank you so much, Durgé. Excited about our partnership together to change the world of VC and market research!
Marcus Lowe
This is awesome Yigit! Congrats on the launch 🚀
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@marcus_lowe1 thank you! 😄
Brendan Baker
Love anything in venture that adds transparency, especially from the smartest teams...
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@brendanbaker Thank you so much, Brendan! 🙏
N
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!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@n37 Thank you 🙏 Solving our itch every day :)
Lipsi Jha
Hey Team Product Hunt, I am glad and proud to see the creativity in this area of business. I will be happy to add support if you need it.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@lipsi_jha Thank you, Lipsi! Agreed. There should be more innovation in VC.
Radhika Malik
Great product to help VCs embrace the very tools and technologies they invest in. Congrats on the launch, Yigit and team Vela!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@radhika_malik thank you so much Radhika 🙏🏼
King Maha
helps VCs identify growing market trends, map out relationships, and find fast-growing startups
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@king_maha that is correct, King.
David T. Kim
Not just or VCs, but this sounds super helpful for founders across the globe, outside Silicon Valley. Congrats Yigit!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@david_t_kim you are right David! Many founders use Vela Terminal and find it useful.
Max Cameron
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.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@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/...
Max Cameron
@yigit one of the ways we source investors is by looking at coinvesting. We’ll start by identifying a startup that we’re connected to and/or shares a certain characteristic with us, and look at who participated in their most recent round. Then we’ll look at each of those investors and identify the other deals they’ve 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 doesn’t!
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@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?
Saroj
@yigit : Congrats on the launch team, the product looks amazing.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@saroj_sahoo Thank you so much for your kind words!
UDAY KUMAR JENA
Mind-Blowing Projects. I just wanted to know how you make this projects. Looks wow
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@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.
Johan Steneros
Interesting. Will give it a go.
Yigit Ihlamur
Maker
@jsteneros thank you! Curious to know your feedback afterward.
Johan Steneros
@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.