What funds and founders ask

Velchanos Partners is a strategic advisory firm and a venture builder. The advisory practice works with organisations in transformation: turnarounds, operating-model redesign, executive support and investment diligence. The venture builder originates and builds AI-native SaaS companies in regulated and underserved verticals.

Both practices run on the same discipline. Strategy is only worth what someone can execute afterwards, so the firm works at the level where the two meet rather than handing over a recommendation and leaving.

Juan G. Avedillo founded and leads Velchanos Partners. He was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company and a Partner at The Cocktail (WPP), and served as Co-CEO and COO of Nextail.

He holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de Valladolid and a Master's in Neural Networks from Carnegie Mellon, and teaches Consulting Problem Solving in the International MBA at IE Business School.

Juan G. Avedillo leads and works on every mandate personally. Where an engagement needs additional senior capacity, whether that is a specific sector, a functional discipline or a second pair of hands on execution, Velchanos brings in senior operators and consultants from its network for that mandate.

Nobody is billed to a client to learn the business. There is no standing pyramid of junior consultants to keep utilised.

Velchanos Partners LLP is a Limited Liability Partnership registered in England and Wales under number OC458968, with its registered office at 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.

The firm works globally and remotely. The UK base was chosen for operational flexibility and international contracting, not to define the market it serves.

Velchanos works in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, and publishes this site in all five. On a cross-border mandate that means board conversations, management interviews and documents in the language the business is actually run in, rather than everything routed through English.

Three kinds of client. Private equity and venture capital funds, on investment and scaling diligence and then on operational value creation inside portfolio companies. Founder-led scale-ups that need an operating model to match the growth they already have. And established firms going through strategic, operational or organisational transformation.

Four service lines. Strategic turnarounds, covering P&L optimisation, operational restructuring and strategic repositioning of distressed companies. Executive advisory, meaning shadow-CEO support, board advisory and mentoring for C-level leaders. Investment and scaling, covering diligence and the operational scaling that follows a deal. And strategic and transformation consultancy, from digital evolution through to full operating-model redesign.

Each mandate is scoped in an initial conversation. Diligence on a deal timetable and a multi-quarter turnaround are not the same engagement, so Velchanos sizes scope, duration and commercial terms against what the situation actually requires rather than selling a standard package.

The fastest way to find out whether there is a fit is to describe the situation and the timetable by email.

Advisory is normally engaged on a fee basis. In selected mandates part of the compensation can be structured as equity or linked to value created, where that aligns the firm with the outcome better than a fee does.

Where it applies, it is agreed with the board or the sponsor before any work begins and never introduced during an engagement. Velchanos declines the structure wherever it would compromise its independence as an adviser, which includes mandates where the firm's opinion bears on a transaction it would hold a stake in.

The person you hire is the person who does the work. A large firm sells the partner and staffs the team; Velchanos is engaged for senior judgement applied directly, with senior specialists added for a specific mandate rather than carried as overhead.

That is a trade, and it runs both ways. Velchanos does not take mandates that need fifty consultants in the field. It does take the ones that need someone who has run a P&L and carried the consequences.

A venture builder creates companies instead of funding them. A venture capital fund invests in founders who have already started; an accelerator runs cohorts of existing teams through a fixed programme.

Velchanos originates the thesis, builds the product and the route to market, and stays in as an owner-operator. There is no application process and no cohort, and each venture is built to stand on its own with dedicated product, commercial and operational leadership while sharing infrastructure and AI capability across the portfolio.

Six are under active exploration: occupational risk and compliance, legal and professional services, accounting and business administration, hospitality, human resources, and marine and leisure.

Velchanos announces an individual venture when it reaches commercial traction, not when it launches.

Because that is where the advantage lasts. Regulatory complexity keeps generalist software out, fragmented incumbents mean there is no dominant player to displace, and years of underinvestment in technology leave a low bar to be materially better.

Velchanos looks for all three conditions together. A market with only one of them rarely justifies the years it takes to build a defensible position in it.

That the AI capability is the product architecture, not a layer added on top of it. A product retrofitted with a chat interface still has the workflow and the cost structure it had before.

Velchanos builds ventures where the data model, the workflow and the unit economics assume the automation from the first design decision. That is what makes the cost base different from the incumbent's, rather than only the interface.

Not yet. Velchanos is deliberately patient: a venture is announced when product-market fit, regulatory clarity and a defensible distribution model converge, not at launch.

If you are a fund or an operator with a thesis in one of the verticals under exploration, a direct conversation is the faster route.

Email avedillo@velchanos.com with the situation and the timetable. Enquiries are answered directly by the person who would do the work; there is no intake form and no business-development layer in between.