Our story

We built Vela because
we were tired of waiting

Every breakthrough in intelligence creates a window — a brief moment where the right tools can change how entire industries operate. We built Vela to make sure that window stays open for the teams who move first.

Why we exist
How we got here
2021
Origin
The problem becomes personal
Our founders — running separate teams at a series B startup — both hit the same wall: access to powerful AI models, but no coherent way to use them across real workflows. Every tool was either too narrow or too generic. They started talking.
2022
Founded
Vela is incorporated
Four people, a shared conviction, and a prototype that barely worked. We raised a pre-seed round from a small group of founders and operators who had felt the same frustration. We moved into a single room and started building.
2023
Milestone
First 500 teams, Series A
We launched a closed beta and word spread faster than we expected. By month four we had 500 teams on a waitlist. We closed our Series A — $14M — and hired our first engineering and design leads. Product velocity doubled.
2024
Milestone
Proactive intelligence ships
We released the feature that changed everything — Vela's proactive monitoring layer. Instead of waiting to be asked, Vela began watching your connected data and surfacing what mattered before you thought to ask. Retention jumped 40% in 30 days.
2025
Now
Rebuilt on Super AI
We gained early access to Super AI — the post-AGI intelligence layer that reasons with genuine depth and context. We spent six months rebuilding Vela's core on this foundation. The product you use today runs on it.
Next
Ahead
The work is just beginning
We are building toward a future where every person in every organization has access to intelligence that is genuinely useful — not just impressive. That goal is still miles away. We are moving toward it every day.
The team
Built by people who
have done this before

We are a team of 38 across product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. Our founding team has shipped products used by tens of millions of people.

AK
Arjun Kapoor
Co-founder & CEO
Previously VP Product at Notion. Obsessed with the gap between what AI can do and what people actually use it for.
SL
Sara Lin
Co-founder & CTO
Former Staff Engineer at Stripe, then Cohere. Holds 4 patents in applied ML.
MO
Marcus Obi
Head of Design
Led design at Linear and Loom. Thinks most enterprise software is designed as if users don't have feelings.
NR
Nadia Russo
Head of Research
PhD in Computational Linguistics, Stanford. Spent four years at DeepMind working on reasoning models.
What we believe
Principles we build by
Clarity over cleverness
The smartest thing a product can do is make you feel smart using it. If you have to think about the tool, the tool has failed.
Trust is the product
Every decision we make about data, privacy, and accuracy is a decision about whether you can trust us. Your data is yours. Always.
Speed is a feature
Slow tools don't get used. We treat performance as a first-class design constraint. If Vela takes too long, you've already decided to do it yourself.
Humans stay in control
Vela is a thinking partner, not a decision maker. The goal is always to help you make a better decision faster, never to make the decision for you.
Honest by default
We tell you when Vela is uncertain. We surface conflicting information rather than smoothing it over. Intellectual honesty is non-negotiable.
Built for what's next
We don't build for the intelligence that exists today. We build for the intelligence that's coming — without requiring you to relearn anything.
The intelligence layer beneath Vela

AI. AGI. And now
Super AI.

Intelligence has been advancing in distinct eras. Each one created a new category of what was possible. We are living through the transition into the third era — and Vela is built natively on it.

AI
Pattern recognition
AGI
General reasoning
Super AI
Deep understanding
Beyond
Unknown
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