New AI research helps VCs vet ideas 10x faster


SAN FRANCISCO, March 27, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Vela Research in collaboration with researchers from the University of Oxford have published a new decision-making framework powered by artificial intelligence. Vela Research is the research arm of Vela Partners, the world’s first AI-native and product-led venture capitalist (VC) firm. The research paper entitled Decision GPT: A Framework to Make Critical Decisions is designed to transform how VCs make investment decisions.

Conventional investment methodologies such as solely relying on a venture capitalist’s reasoning can cause resources to flow to the wrong ideas and teams, increasing investment risk and slowing down the pace of innovation. Decision GPT scans a startup founder’s background and their business idea on the internet and uses LLMs to produce an extensive report to help a VC determine whether to invest in the business. This helps millions of companies to be analyzed by an investor at human-level reasoning and efficiently scales decision making.

"We have been pursuing artificial general intelligence for venture capital since 2016. This is an outcome of many years of relentless research of 80+ Vela Research and University of Oxford researchers that have open-sourced and published more than 20+ models and papers,” said Fuat Alican, a general partner at Vela Partners.

The core of Decision GPT is to generate pros and cons for any critical decision. The use-case explored in the research paper is the evaluation of startups based on startup founders and their ideas. The AI-powered framework identifies the characteristics of successful founders and ventures, analyzing these traits to assess a startup’s potential for success, and evaluate founder-idea fit, an assessment of whether a specific founder can successfully launch a specific business idea.

"I was surprised how effective LLMs could be at identifying successful founder characteristics,” said Sichao Xiong from the University of Oxford. Pantelis Papageorgiou, another researcher from the same institution added: “When weighing characteristics of a successful founder, our research determined that a founder’s perseverance mattered more than which university they attended or where they previously worked.”

Yigit Ihlamur, another general partner at Vela Partners, noted: “40% of Vela Partners investments have been sourced by Vela’s proprietary AI up to this point. We’re excited to fund the next unicorn with this new innovation.”

For more information on Decision GPT and its applications, please contact val@brighthousecomms.com.

About Vela Partners

Vela Partners is a San Francisco-based, product-led and AI-native VC firm, building an AI-only portfolio. It was founded by ex-Googlers and serial entrepreneurs in 2016. Vela AI Suite is automating the work of VCs such as sourcing, evaluation, decision-making, relationships and market intelligence.

 

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