Yigit Ihlamur stands out among seed investors for publishing academic research on how AI and large language models can be used to guide venture decisions, and for building tools like Vela Coach that study founder meetings to spot communication patterns and conviction gaps. He was once a top-10 ranked chess player in Turkey, evaluates founders mainly through their personal stories and drive rather than market size, and says books like Sapiens have shaped how he thinks about human behavior and the use of AI.
About their Fund
Sectors
AI, Data, Devtools, SaaS, Fintech
Rounds
Seed
Avg Check Size
$100K–$500K
Notable Investments
Vela Partners is a seed-stage venture fund focused only on AI startups, built on a five-plus-year research partnership with the University of Oxford and run with a decision process that requires agreement from two human partners and one machine partner, using tools like its VCBench benchmark, Entrepreneur OS, and Vela Coach to turn founder evaluation and venture decisions into measurable, data-driven processes. Its founders, including an ex-Google engineer trained at Oxford, set out in 2017 to build an AI startup that invests in other AI startups, and the fund now backs that approach with quantified, minutes-to-days decision speed, an open-sourced agent-memory database, and tier-1 VC firms listed among its own limited partners.
Notable Fund
Investments
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Sheets they're in
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Sheets they're Fund is in
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Popular Investors
investor name
Active in
Rounds
Avg. Check
Links
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