# Vela Partners

> Vela Partners is a VC fund backing Software and Information Technology. See 66 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 66
- Last investment: Jul 2026
- Lead investor: 17%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/17989133
- Website: http://vela.partners

Vela Partners is a VC fund in San Francisco focused on Software and Information Technology. We back early-stage AI startups for top-decile returns. Tier-1 VCs are limited partners.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for Vela Partners. Shizune tracks 3 team members at Vela Partners. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/vela-partners?utm_source=investor_profile

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $1.9M–$13M |
| Series A | $6.5M–$25M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 14 | 21% |
| Information Technology | 8 | 12% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 7 | 11% |
| Machine Learning | 4 | 6% |
| B2B | 3 | 5% |

65 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 22 | 33% |
| Series A | 15 | 23% |
| Funding Round | 3 | 5% |
| Pre-Seed | 2 | 3% |
| Series B | 1 | 2% |

6 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 27 | 41% |
| Germany | 2 | 3% |
| Japan | 1 | 2% |
| South Korea | 1 | 2% |

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Baris Yesugey | Limited Partner | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/baris-yesugey |
| Fuat Alican | Co-founder, General Partner, and Chief Investment Officer | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/fuat-alican |
| Yigit Ihlamur | Co-founder, General Partner | 8 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/yigit-ihlamur |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discern Security | Discern Security develops artificial intelligence software that helps organizations assess, prioritize, and remediate cybersecurity risks across enterprise environments. The company's platform integrates with security tools to consolidate posture, configuration, asset, identity, vulnerability, and compliance data into a unified operationalview for security teams. Its technology provides AI-powered analysis, risk prioritization, automated security controls assessment, remediation workflows, policy management, and security dashboards that support continuous monitoring and operational decision-making.Discern Security also offers autonomous AI agents that assist with posture evaluation, remediation planning, workflow orchestration, reporting, and cross-platform security management while maintaining governance and auditability. The company's platform is designed to help security teams improve visibility, automate routine security operations, optimize existing security controls, and manage cyber risk across cloud, endpoint, identity, email, and software-as-a-service environments. | $13M | Series A | Jul 30, 2026 |  |
| ReFiBuy | Triangle Tweener Fund seeks to create an index of private company investments in their early stages. Its goal is to create an index of Triangle-area early-stage, high-tech startups that meet the 'Tweener List' Criteria. | $15.3M | Seed | May 05, 2026 |  |
| Pensieve | Pensieve is an AI educational platform that handles grading and provides feedback to colleges with lectures. | $6.9M | Seed | Feb 24, 2026 |  |
| Mirelo AI | Mirelo AI offers AI-driven tools that generate custom sound effects and music to match video content through upload or API integration. It enables users to produce synced audio from silent footage and refine or edit audio tracks with an intuitive online editor. The platform also provides APIs and model fine-tuning options that let other productsembed its video-to-sound capabilities directly into their workflows. Mirelo’s technology is based on proprietary AI models designed to interpret visual media and automatically generate corresponding audio elements. The company sources and processes input files to output audio that aligns with visual action and creative intent. | $41M | Seed | Dec 15, 2025 |  |
| Nominal | Nominal empowers the next-generation economy.Nominal modernizes and automates accounting and financial management, providing robust reporting, multi-entity consolidation, workflow automation (including accruals and revenue), lease compliance (ASC 842/IFRS 16), period-end close collaboration, and much more.Nominal's generativesubledgers transform business logic into actions and insights using Generative AI - without the need for costly engineering or lengthy IT projects. Our shadow-ledger is implemented in days, not months, and seamlessly integrates with existing general ledgers and ERPs. | $20M | Series A | Jul 09, 2025 |  |
| Bito | Bito is a game-changing productivity tool for developers that accelerates software development using best in class AI models, like ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Anthropic. Bito’s plugin integrates seamlessly into a developer’s IDE and CLI, providing instant access to their own personal AI assistant. Nearly 100,000 developers are using Bito toincrease their productivity by an incredible 31%, performing more than 1 million AI requests a week. Bito is helping them more than 200 times per month, which is more than they use search. Developers from companies such as Google, Airbnb, Riot Games, Tesla, Houzz, and Goldman Sachs use Bito to increase their productivity significantly by shortening the time to quality code, reducing bugs, improving devs understanding of unfamiliar code, and allows developers to spend more time on critical thinking and less time on dull and irksome work. | $5.7M | Seed | May 27, 2025 |  |
| Promise | Promise is a film, series, and innovative format studio powered by the world’s best Gen AI artists and storytellers. |  | Venture - Series Unknown | May 20, 2025 |  |
| Rigor AI | Rigor AI (rigor.ai) is an early-stage technology startup, founded by several repeat entrepreneurs. We've been operational since January 2025. | $3.2M | Seed | May 16, 2025 |  |
| ReFiBuy | Triangle Tweener Fund seeks to create an index of private company investments in their early stages. Its goal is to create an index of Triangle-area early-stage, high-tech startups that meet the 'Tweener List' Criteria. | $1.7M | Pre-Seed | Mar 13, 2025 |  |
| Auxia | Auxia is a composable, AI-based platform designed to help businesses accelerate product-led growth. It offers a suite of tools that help drive product growth, activate and engage customers, and monetize customer interactions. These tools also enable the creation and deployment of hyper-personalized campaigns and growth experiments, leveragingmachine learning models that adapt to user actions and preferences. | $23.5M | Series A | Mar 04, 2025 |  |

10 of 66 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Incubate Fund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/incubate-fund) — VC Fund, 17 deals together
- [Andreessen Horowitz](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/andreessen-horowitz) — VC Fund, 6 deals together
- [Commerce Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/commerce-ventures) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [468 Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/468-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Atlantic](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/atlantic-labs) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Ridge Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/ridge-ventures) — VC Fund, 4 deals together

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## FAQ

### What does Vela Partners invest in?

Vela Partners invests primarily in Software, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 66 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Vela Partners's check size?

Vela Partners typically joins rounds of $1.9M–$13M at Seed and $6.5M–$25M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Vela Partners participates in.

### How do I contact Vela Partners?

Public channels for Vela Partners include LinkedIn and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.

### Who are the partners at Vela Partners?

The team at Vela Partners includes Baris Yesugey (Limited Partner), Fuat Alican (Co-founder, General Partner, and Chief Investment Officer) and Yigit Ihlamur (Co-founder, General Partner). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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