Vela Partners
113 Park Ln, West Harrison, New York, 10604, United States
Overview
Vela Partners is the world's first product-led and AI-powered venture capital firm.
- Total investments
- 19
- Lead investments
- 3
- Investments · 12mo
- 1
- Active investors
- 3
Sector focus
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- B2B
- Developer Tools
- Machine Learning
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- ReFiBuy
Participated · Seed · May 2026
ReFiBuy develops infrastructure that transforms product catalogs so they can be evaluated, compared, and recommended by AI agents. The company describes its work as creating Agentic Commerce Optimization to bridge the gap between current retailer catalogs and agent-driven purchasing workflows. Its product aims to make product data machine-usable for discovery and purchase decisions on AI platforms. ReFiBuy announced an oversubscribed $13.6M Seed raise, providing its current financial runway. The company presented the funding as a response to most brands and retailers not being ready for agentic commerce and as a way to help them adapt.
- Bito
Led · Seed · May 2025
Bito offers an AI Code Review Agent that integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket to provide line-by-line feedback, issue detection, performance optimizations, and one-click fix suggestions across more than 50 programming languages. The platform deeply understands code context and architectural design patterns to produce codebase-aware reviews and maintain enterprise-grade security. Bito says it reviews and improves more than 10,000 pull requests each week for enterprises including Gainsight, Whatfix, and PubMatic. Customers reportedly see 89% faster pull request merges, 34% fewer regressions, 87% of pull request feedback provided by AI, and $14 returned for every $1 spent on the tooling. The company plans to deepen its agentic tooling and codebase awareness, invest in deeper CI/CD integrations, and grow its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. Financially, Bito has completed a $5.7M seed extension and now has $8.8M in total seed-stage funding.
- Auxia
Participated · Series A · Mar 2025
Auxia provides an agentic marketing platform that converts first‑party data into model‑driven, self‑optimizing customer journeys without requiring large internal data science teams. Built by former Google and Meta engineers and growth leaders, the platform extracts real‑time signals, runs concurrent ML experiments, and deploys synchronized AI agents to personalize and optimize every customer touchpoint. Since launching in early 2024, Auxia has seen rapid adoption across retail, finance and other enterprises, with customers increasing usage over 35% month‑over‑month. The platform processes over 2.6 billion events daily and handles 6,500 queries per second at peak, and the company cites early customer results such as an 84% increase in lifetime value and 50%+ uplift in onboarding completion. Auxia plans to use new funding to expand engineering headcount, develop Analyst and Content AI capabilities and new AI Decisioning Agents, and to scale sales, marketing and customer success for U.S. expansion. The company emphasizes replacing manual segmentation and A/B testing workflows with autonomous, model‑driven personalization to drive measurable revenue growth.
- Vieu
Participated · Seed · Oct 2024
Vieu offers an AI-powered Sales Graph platform that indexes billions of relationships and industry-specific data sets to reveal deep social connections and account intelligence, aiming to build trust from the first touchpoint. The product is positioned as an alternative to legacy list-based tools and social networks and is designed to fast-track enterprise sales by enabling warm, trust-driven introductions. Vieu says customers secure first meetings with target enterprise customers five times faster and increase sales team productivity threefold. The company reported a period of hypergrowth, with customer and revenue numbers more than tripling and onboarding several marquee publicly listed organizations over the last year. Vieu plans to scale its AI-powered trusted business network and leverage LLMs and proprietary data to enhance its graph-based semantic platform. Founders Samir Manjure and Simon Skaria are both Microsoft veterans and have deep expertise in enterprise software and startups, and they built the product after extensive conversations with sales leaders frustrated by proliferating, ineffective tools. Vieu uses generative AI and semantic knowledge graphs to identify high-propensity strategic accounts and produce auto-generated account plans and on-the-rail execution plans for each pursuit. The company was launched in 2022 by serial tech entrepreneurs and former Microsoft executives Samir Manjure and Simon Skaria. Vieu Connections Graph fuses internet, enterprise, and end-user data to create a data moat and deliver prescriptive, contextual actions rather than more raw insights. Multiple enterprise sales teams worldwide are using Vieu, with Seclore cited as an early adopter. With a global launch, Vieu offers an outcome-focused pricing model and a 100% money-back guarantee to encourage adoption amid macro cost-optimization. The company raised $2 million in funding from a group of marquee angels, founders/CEOs, and GTM executives.
- Cartken
Participated · Equity · Jul 2024
Cartken develops sidewalk and indoor delivery robots using a camera-first, AI-driven autonomy stack that requires no lidar and can operate without GPS. The company was founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the Bookbot project and has a roughly 30-person team. Cartken runs sidewalk delivery services on college campuses in Miami, Fairfax, Virginia and Tokyo through partnerships with Uber Eats, Grubhub and Mitsubishi Electric; its robots average 36,000 deliveries per month. The startup says its sidewalk delivery business is profitable today and that newly raised capital will scale that business while unlocking indoor use cases. Cartken is deploying robots inside biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical and automotive campuses — including a ZF factory — and reported saving employees more than 10,000 hours in 2023 at labs and factories.