Investment Memo
Company: Vela
Founders: Two co founders, brothers, with complementary technical and product skill sets
Stage: Early, pre seed
Category: B2B AI, workflow intelligence, scheduling
Business Model: B2B SaaS, per seat subscription
Primary User: Recruiting firms and talent teams with high interview and coordination volume
What is Vela
Raised in Oman and now finishing Penn through the Huntsman Program on an unusually accelerated path, Gobhanu has been building companies since his early teens. His first venture was a microfinance nonprofit operating across dozens of countries, focused on providing small amounts of capital to people excluded from traditional financial systems. That early exposure has set him up to build Vela alongside his brother, Saatvik. The team is currently part of the YC winter batch (YCW26).
Vela is an AI-powered scheduling platform, focusing on third-party coordination. So this means situations where the scheduler is responsible for making meetings happen between two other parties. This matters most in staffing and recruiting, where agencies coordinate interviews between candidates and clients while competing with other firms for the same roles. In that environment, scheduling directly affects aspects of recruiting like placement rates. By focusing on these firms, they position themselves to sell into workflows where everything is usually delayed, and where automating scheduling can have very quick impact.
Just think of all those moments you were emailing an executive assistant trying to set up a time with their boss, and you sent five separate emails with availability only for none of them to work.
Once Vela is embedded within a firm, they are able to streamline this.
GTM and Growth
Vela’s GTM strategy is intentionally narrow. Early on, Gobhanu mentioned that he had explored broader enterprise use cases, including private equity and professional services firms, where meeting volume is high but urgency varies. Then what became clear is that productivity alone rarely creates urgency for a buyer to move, which plays into the psychology of being a consumer. People don’t buy software because it sounds efficient. They buy when they can see how it changes outcomes inside an existing workflow, not when it’s framed as a nice feature to layer on.
Gobhanu’s Mindset
Gobhanu is basically a seasoned founder, with a past in entrepreneurship from as young as 14, but that did not come easily! He was rejected from YC twice, and then was accepted in Z Fellows before being finally accepted to YC this winter. He made it clear that being in the cohort is less about validation and more about acceleration. This is the type of feedback I hear A LOT from YC founders. They mention how from that simple “(YCXYY)” logo, they gain this instant credibility that makes the sales game a tiny bit easier.
I was really curious about how he feels to be in a current YC batch and living in SF. From the outside, that seems like the ultimate launch pad in creating the next paypal mafia if you meet the right people and really bond with them. The male dominated city of SF is arguably the most important place to be in the generation of tech, so he was clear on a few ways to spend time in the city:
“Being in SF without meeting people is almost a little pointless. So much of a startup is work that you have to put in by yourself.” He went on to explain that if you are locked in a room in SF working all day and not meeting people, there’s no ROI on moving to a expensive hilly city.
“So it’s actually a very interesting dichotomy: do you have to be locked in on building a product and a company, versus how do you get the benefits of SF and the accelerator that this city is?”
Side note on Gobhanu: He was wonderful to talk to and had this optimism about him that made our meeting less of an interview and more of a conversation. He also speaks with such optimism.
My take
I think Vela is solving a real problem and I have definitely been a victim to poor scheduling on behalf of talent recruiters and their hundreds of emails they send to candidates, oftentimes losing my emails, and not getting back to me until after the recruiting timeline was over (true story). For them, distribution is everything. So finding the right firms, the big banks, and the messy recruiters who need help managing multiple executive calendars will be their sweet spot.
A cool future I can see for them is potentially creating a partnership with larger calendar service platforms like Calendly to integrate their model with them. A lot of companies are struggling to be AI forward because of lack of engineering talent and poor leadership, so that would be my idea of a mutually beneficial relationship.
Gobhanu and his brother are crushing it, and you can learn more about Vela here: tryvela.ai