Christian Vela

Christian Vela is a fintech investor and network-builder who spent the first part of his career in private equity and corporate venture capital before founding his own fintech community. He worked in private equity at K1 Investment Management (a software-focused PE firm) from roughly 2016 to 2018, then joined American Express Ventures — the strategic/corporate investing arm of American Express — where he served as an investor from January 2018 to January 2021, focused on fintech and financial-technology startups. He holds a degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In April 2022 he founded Collective150 (branded as "C150" or "The Collective"), a private, invitation-only network of leading venture capitalists and fintech industry leaders. He describes building C150 after leading investments at Amex Ventures and after advising and investing in multiple fintech and software startups at incubation and growth stages. The organization has grown to 120+ member VCs across New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Collective150's model centers on convening founders, operators, LPs, and investors around fintech. It runs three main programs: a Founder Series (invite-only dinners connecting fintech founders and VCs), an LP Series (gatherings between institutional allocators and GPs), and Enterprise Partners (connecting corporate strategic goals with portfolio startups). Vela positions the network as a kind of "personal advisory board" for founders, leveraging an experts-/executives-in-residence ("XIR") network across mentorship, networking, and fundraising.

• Sector: Fintech-first — financial technology and adjacent software; this is the through-line across his Amex Ventures work and Collective150.
• Stage: Early stage / seed, with an emphasis on "incubation and growth" — helping founders during critical scaling phases.
• How he adds value: Positions himself at the intersection of "thesis building, startup scaling, and aligning executive corporate goals" — i.e., helping fintech startups navigate enterprise partnerships and go-to-market, drawing on his American Express / corporate-VC background.
• Network as leverage: Rather than writing large institutional checks, his primary vehicle is Collective150 — connecting founders raising capital with 120+ member VCs via "capital dinners," and connecting startups to enterprise partners for commercial synergies.
• Stated mission (his own framing): C150 was "born out of experiences from VCs, angels, advisors and founders looking for a better way to scale innovation" — aiming to "help the lonely journey of being a founder, increase knowledge transfer, and build relationships amongst founders, operators and investors excited about Fintech."