Vellum
YC W23New York City, US · Founded 2023 · 23 employees · 5 known investors
Vellum builds AI development tools and platforms for teams building AI applications. The company focuses on helping customers navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape through products and expertise.
Also known as Vocify
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareFuture of WorkUnited States of AmericaAmerica / CanadaPartly Remote
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W23)
Vellum was founded in 2023 by Akash Sharma, Sidd Seethepalli, and Noa Flaherty.
AS
Akash SharmainCEO and FounderAkash Sharma spent five years at McKinsey's Silicon Valley office before working at Dover (YC S19) for over two years, where he and his co-founders built production applications of large language models. He is now co-founder of Vellum, which provides MLOps tooling for language models.
SS
Sidd SeethepalliinCTO & FounderSidd Seethepalli was a founding engineer at Dover, an S19 startup. He is now at Vellum (W23).
NF
Noa FlahertyinCTO & FounderNoa Flaherty is an MIT-educated engineer who previously worked on DataRobot's MLOps team and spent 2+ years at Dover (YC S19) building production LLM applications. At Vellum, Flaherty co-founded a platform providing MLOps tooling for large language models.
Investors · 5
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements$20M disclosed across 1 of 2 rounds · 2025
- $20MSeries AJul 2025 · 4 sourcesSource ↗
- Undisclosed amountseed roundJul 2023
Eastlink Capital, Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Y Combinator
Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
The YC application· Winter 2023 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- The founders met while working together for over two years at Dover (YC S19), where they built production LLM use cases. Noa and Sidd are MIT-trained engineers who previously worked on DataRobot's MLOps team and Quora's ML Platform team, and Akash spent five years at McKinsey's Silicon Valley office. While building user-facing LLM applications with GPT-3 and Cohere, they repeatedly had to construct internal tooling to compare models, fine-tune them, and track performance, which led them to build such tooling as a product.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Images
Founder mafia
2 people who came through Vellum went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 9
by search overlap
DataCamp953 shared keywordsDataCamp is a learning platform for teams that teaches data and AI skills through hands-on coursework accessible via web browser and mobile app. It serves enterprise customers and development teams seeking to build technical capabilities.
Hugging Face924 shared keywordsHugging Face is a collaboration platform that hosts and provides access to machine learning models, datasets, and applications. It offers both open-source tools for the ML community and paid compute and enterprise solutions for teams building AI applications.
OpenAI840 shared keywordsOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) with emphasis on safety and beneficial outcomes for humanity.
Netezza782 shared keywordsIBM is a global technology company whose business spans enterprise software (including Red Hat, HashiCorp, and Confluent), IT infrastructure such as mainframes, servers, and storage, and IT consulting services. The company is also investing heavily in quantum computing and AI-based enterprise offerings, including its Lightwell open-source software security clearinghouse and the Anderon quantum wafer foundry.
LLM Stats751 shared keywordsllm-stats.com provides open, reproducible evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure for large language models and AI systems. The platform aggregates 200+ benchmarks and enables performance comparisons across frontier AI models to support informed decision-making by researchers, enterprises, and model developers.
Zapier745 shared keywordsZapier provides a platform for connecting AI models and agents to workflows and business applications, enabling teams to automate tasks across over 9,000 apps without coding. The platform serves enterprises, operations teams, and businesses of all sizes looking to deploy AI-driven automation for lead capture, customer support, employee onboarding, and other business processes.
OpenRouter648 shared keywordsOpenRouter operates an AI gateway that allows developers to access and compare hundreds of language models from multiple providers in a single platform. The service eliminates vendor lock-in while offering improved pricing, uptime, and reliability for companies and developers.
Onyx510 shared keywordsOnyx is an open-source application platform for large language models that enables teams to leverage any LLM while maintaining data transparency and customization. The platform integrates internet search, internal knowledge connectors, code execution, and model context protocol integrations to provide enterprise and startup teams with flexible AI deployment options.
n8n396 shared keywordsn8n is a visual and code-based workflow automation platform that enables technical teams to build, connect, and deploy AI agents and integrations with flexible deployment options ranging from on-premise to cloud infrastructure.
Companies competing with Vellum for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does Vellum do?
- Vellum builds AI development tools and platforms for teams building AI applications. The company focuses on helping customers navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape through products and expertise.
- Who founded Vellum?
- Vellum was founded by Akash Sharma, Sidd Seethepalli, Noa Flaherty in 2023.
- Who are Vellum's investors?
- Vellum's investors include Eastlink Capital Partners, Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Socii Capital, Twenty Two Ventures.
- How much funding has Vellum raised?
- Vellum has disclosed $20M raised across 1 of its 2 known rounds.
- Where is Vellum headquartered?
- Vellum is headquartered in New York City, US.