Yigit
Ihlamur

Profile

The man who turned gut feel into an algorithm

His father carried a computer on his shoulder up five flights of stairs every night. No elevator. A technology entrepreneur in Turkey in the early 1990s, balancing a day job and a startup dream. Little Yigit waited at the top. The computer arrived. And something stuck.

That image - a man willing to haul the future home one floor at a time - lives in everything Yigit Ihlamur has built since. Today, as co-founder and General Partner of Vela Partners, he's the one carrying the weight. Except now the cargo is a proprietary AI system that reads three hundred startups a week, distills them into signal, and helps him write a check faster than most VCs schedule their first call.

Vela Partners is not a conventional venture firm. Yigit describes it as an AI-native quantitative VC - a phrase that would sound like marketing if the research didn't back it up. Backed by tier-one VCs and armed with what Yigit calls Ventech (venture technology), the firm deploys $100K-$500K seed checks with soft commitments in two to seven days. Their AI suite filters millions of companies down to the 300-odd worth a second look each week, with a human - Yigit and his team - acting as the final filter.

He started at four. DOS games, shell commands, an introduction to computing that most kids today get from YouTube. By his teens, his father had taught him Turbo Pascal and pulled him into client meetings, giving him a front-row seat to the mechanics of running an enterprise technology company. His mother, a mathematician, held the family together financially while his father built - a quiet lesson in what conviction looks like from the inside.

Chess came next. Not casually - he ranked in Turkey's national top ten. The game teaches something that holds in venture capital: patterns repeat. The position on the board at move 12 tells you something about move 40. Most people don't read that far ahead. Yigit learned early to try.

He took that pattern-recognition discipline to Koç University, where he studied Industrial Engineering, and then to Oxford, where he completed an MSc in Computer Science with a focus on AI and machine learning, writing a master's thesis on recommendation engines while living at Kellogg College. Oxford, he says, gave him exposure to "pioneering individuals and ideas" - an understatement for a program that shaped how he thinks about machine judgment at scale.

Five years at Google followed. Senior Program Manager, first in Dublin working on EMEA business products, then in Mountain View on Google Cloud and Enterprise. He applied his Oxford ML training daily - assessing technology, shipping product features, navigating the kind of organizational complexity that only a company at Google's scale can produce. He calls that period foundational: "Having operator experience builds founder rapport." He learned how products break before he started funding the people building them.

The pivot came after Google. Six months of exploring ideas. A group of entrepreneurs he kept running into who, he noticed, preferred sharing networks and knowledge over talking about their jobs. That cluster became the seed of Vela Partners, co-founded in 2017 with Fuat Alican. The premise was almost counterintuitive: use AI to invest in AI. Not as a gimmick - as a genuine edge.

The numbers bear it out. Vela has backed 40+ AI startups including Limitless (AI wearable for recording personal information), Grabango (checkout-free retail), Interviewing.io (bias-reduction hiring), Base Operations (urban safety navigation), Meditopia (mindfulness), Bito (developer tools), and Vieu. The firm is a board observer or member at five portfolio companies. Their Vela Terminal product hit #1 Product of the Day and Month on Product Hunt.

But what separates Vela from other AI-focused VCs is the research program. Yigit is not just an investor who reads papers - he writes them. His Google Scholar profile lists 58 citations, an h-index of 5, and a body of work including Founder-GPT (applying self-play techniques to evaluate founder-idea fit), Automating Venture Capital (LLM-powered segmentation and labeling of founders), and the Startup Success Forecasting Framework, which won a Best Poster award at NeurIPS 2025. The workshop was about AI; the poster was about predicting which startups survive. The irony is deliberate.

He reads Sapiens and F.S.C. Northrop's The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities. He has practiced Benjamin Franklin's early-rising discipline for seventeen consecutive years. He lives in the Bay Area with his spouse and two children. He values, above all things, being a good human being and working unbelievably hard. The rest, he says, follows.

Vela Partners is a Pledge 1% member, supporting women-focused entrepreneurship and scholarships. The firm's investment criteria aren't just a checklist - they're a philosophy. Why does this founder exist for this problem? Where has mastery shown up before? How fast do they move? What's the "why now"? These questions, filtered through AI and human judgment together, are what Ventech looks like in practice.