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 👂
