New AI agent for venture capital: 100x cheaper, 5x faster and on-par quality with humans


SAN FRANCISCO, June 05, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, the research arm of Vela Partners, the world’s first AI-native VC firm, in collaboration with the University of Oxford published a research paper outlining an AI-native decision-making framework for startup investments. The paper, listed in Cornell University’s arXiv entitled as “An Automated Startup Evaluation Pipeline: Startup Success Forecasting Framework (SSFF)”, improves the assessment of early-stage startups substantially.

SSFF is a large language model (LLM) framework packaged into an AI agent that evaluates startups 5x faster and 100x cheaper than a skilled human VC analyst while maintaining human-level reasoning and quality. Unlike humans, this AI agent never gets bored or tired. It scales and gets better and cheaper as LLM providers release cheaper and better models.

“This is a first in the VC industry. I have never met an expert who can analyze one million companies in a year, with continuously improving quality and decreasing costs. This is a superpower,” said Yigit Ihlamur, a general partner at Vela Partners. “We’re excited to open-source and share our research, so that all VC firms can adopt this breakthrough and allocate their resources to projects more efficiently.”

Vela Partners’ AI agent is designed to reason, synthesize, and decide like a venture capitalist. It needs almost no data input – a company’s domain name or a founder’s LinkedIn profile would suffice. Once received, it analyzes the company in minutes producing an analysis and a score that enables a VC to make a preliminary investment decision.

If a human analyst were to perform this same task, it would take longer, be more expensive and the quality of the report would be inconsistent across analysts depending on their experiences and skill sets. Based on Vela’s calculations, it costs $20 for an expert VC in Silicon Valley to analyze a startup. With the AI agent, it only costs 20 cents.

Vela Partners AI Agent Comparison

“AI Agents demonstrate remarkable potential in elevating human productivity,” said Xisen Wang, the researcher from the University of Oxford. “The integration of deep learning models with LLMs unlocks novel capabilities. This breakthrough can augment complex decision-making in all sectors.”

About Vela Partners

Vela Partners is a San Francisco-based, product-led and AI-native VC firm, building an AI-only portfolio since inception.

For media inquiries:

Valerie Fernandes
val@brighthousecomms.com

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