Announcing our $20m Series A

A year ago, everyone was racing to prototype with AI. Now everyone is learning that it's one thing to build a demo and another thing entirely to get it production-ready. At Vellum, we've lived that gap and it's why we exist. Today I'm excited to share that we've raised $20M in Series A funding, a milestone that allows us to double down on helping teams bridge that gap from proof of concept to production ready AI systems. The round was led by Leaders Fund, with participation from Y Combinator, Socii Capital, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund and Eastlink Capital. It’s a big milestone for us, but more than anything, it validates what we’ve been seeing on the ground: the need for a standard approach to bring AI products into production, especially inside large, complex organizations.

The promise of AI is clear. We all dream of a future where AI agents automate the mundane work and we focus on the high leverage creative tasks. AI also comes with real business value, AI native companies like Cursor & Lovable have shown rocketship growth & industry leaders like Salesforce are making AI a core part of their strategy.

But what about the others?

Building AI applications is still a massive challenge. For those that make it to market, it often takes many quarters of painstaking work, and many more fall by the wayside because they can’t meet quality standards.

With our latest funding, we’re committed to accelerating AI adoption globally.

Why build an AI Development Standard?

Since March 2020, Sidd, Noa, and I have been building AI applications with LLMs and we’ve bumped into the same roadblocks every time:

What works in a demo often breaks in production because models behave unpredictably. The pace of change makes it nearly impossible to stay current, let alone build with confidence (agents weren’t mainstream until just 6 months ago!) Everything falls on engineers, making them the main bottleneck

Developing AI feels like writing software in quicksand, the ground keeps shifting and teams struggle just to stay afloat.

We’ve worked with over 150 companies across industries, ranging from bleeding edge startups to household names like Swisscom, Redfin, Drata and Headspace and the same pattern emerges: successful AI requires structured, cross-functional teamwork and rigorous development practices.

A Platform to Bring Rigor to AI Development

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Vellum is an enterprise development platform for building, evaluating, and deploying mission-critical AI products. It is the most comprehensive on the market, helping cross functional teams work together through the entire AI development lifecycle.

• AI workflow definition : A UI builder and SDK let teams visualize, test, and refine AI logic. Engineers and non-technical experts can collaborate side by side.
• End-to-end evaluation : A robust testing suite catches failures and edge cases before they reach production.
• Safe deployments : Push updates and publish new versions without risky redeploys. Vellum enables precise version control, even in highly complex environments.
• Live monitoring and continuous improvement : Real-time observability shows how systems behave in the real world, with live feedback loops that feed directly into testing.

What is the Test-Driven Development Standard?

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We believe true test driven development is the standard AI teams need to build systems they can trust and control as they grow. Every part of our platform is designed around this principle, turning best practices into everyday workflows and cutting time to production from quarters to weeks. This brings control, rigor, and reliability:

• One place for the full workflow: Build, test, deploy, and monitor AI systems in a single platform. Every change is tracked and versioned for clear history and explainability.
• Standards you can trust: Ship only when your models meet real quality, cost, and latency goals. Keep iterating with confidence as new models or orchestration techniques emerge.
• Learning built in: Test driven development turns every update into a lesson. Teams gain a deeper understanding of how AI works in practice and adapt fast as needs change.

This only works when everyone has the right tools and context.

Vellum gives engineers an SDK to manage and control their environments with confidence, while product managers and domain experts use a visual builder to shape AI behavior without writing code. Everyone works in the same space, sharing context and staying in sync as they build, evaluate, and iterate on AI systems together.

Our customers’ wins

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Every team wants the same thing from AI: to move fast without sacrificing quality. What they build, though, is unique to their world. With Vellum they turn these ideas into reliable AI products and keep standards high while enabling their teams to move fast.

• Swisscom has made Vellum a core part of their AI platform, giving Swiss banks and governments a secure and reliable way to build AI applications.
• Drata builds and secures 7,000+ isolated knowledge bases to drive compliant GRC automation across tenants. PMs and engineers collaborate in Vellum for rapid validation and deployment.
• Redfin rolled out “Ask Redfin” to millions of users across 14 markets by having their domain experts evaluate the conversational agent using thousands of test cases.
• DeepScribe cuts clinician note iteration time by 20–40%, using feedback loops and regression testing to ensure accuracy and trust.
• Rely Health went from multi engineer, multi month builds to deploying healthcare workflows in days, automating voice agents, smart triage, and charting because of Vellum tracing and decoupled deployments.
• Rentgrata launched “Ari”, a renter chatbot, with Vellum powering testing, deployment, and post-launch monitoring for airtight accuracy.
• GravityStack slashed credit agreement review time by 200% using agentic workflows, powered end-to-end on Vellum.

Educating the Market

In an emerging market like this, sharing what works and what doesn’t is just as important as the platform itself. That’s a big part of what we do. We make sure teams have both so they can build with confidence and learn as they go.

• #1 ranking LLM Leaderboard worldwide sharing which models perform best across different use cases.
• Best practices guides, webinars, and blogs covering recent AI developments, orchestration strategy, observability, and evaluation frameworks.
• Live training through office hours and workshops to help product, ML, and engineering teams build production ready AI systems.
• Technology partnership program with the best service providers to equip our customers with high value talent and instant support from day 1.

What’s next?

I remember someone asking me in Month 2 of our company, “What’s your vision of Vellum?”

My answer back then holds true today: “We’ve lived the AI development pain first-hand so our customers don’t have to. We will be the best-in-class platform engineering teams around the world rely on to power core AI applications.”

Today we are excited to partner with Leaders.vc to scale what we have shown works time and time again. With this capital we will:

• Increase the number of AI use cases deployed through Vellum.
• Lower the time to production of each AI use case deployed through Vellum.
• Expand our presence in new verticals and geographies.
• Cement Vellum as the foundational layer in the AI stack.

We’re building not just software, but the standard of how the world builds AI products. For everyone venturing beyond prototypes where quality, and reliability matter, Vellum is your foundation.

We’re also hiring across the board! If you’re interested in any open role, apply here.

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Let’s build the future together.

Akash Sharma

Founder & CEO, Vellum