Rakesh Goyal / Velt
Profile ◆ Founder & CEO, Velt
Rakesh
Rakesh
Goyal
He helped put augmented reality into Google Maps. Now he is putting collaboration into every app on the internet.
He helped put augmented reality into Google Maps. Now he is putting collaboration into every app on the internet.
Open almost any modern product and someone, somewhere, is rebuilding the same thing: a comment thread. A little green dot that means "online." A cursor with a name attached to it, gliding across a shared document. The features feel small. Building them is not. Real-time presence, conflict-free editing, notifications that fire across browsers and devices - it is months of plumbing that no customer ever thanks you for.
Rakesh Goyal decided that work should only be done once, by someone, for everyone. That someone is Velt, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO. Velt is a full-stack SDK: drop it in, and contextual comments, in-app notifications, async recordings, live presence, huddles and CRDT-based multiplayer editing show up inside your app in days rather than months. The pitch he keeps returning to is a comparison, not a boast - what Okta became for authentication and Algolia became for search, Velt wants to become for collaboration. Infrastructure. A utility. A line item you buy instead of a roadmap you dread.
The customers reading that pitch are not hobbyists. Google, Pendo, Varonis, Runway, HeyGen, LambdaTest and Leadpages have wired Velt into their products. One of them, neatly, is the company Goyal used to work for.
The proof Velt likes best is unglamorous and exact: one engineer added commenting to a product in a few minutes. No design doc, no sprint, no quarter set aside. That is the entire thesis compressed into a single anecdote - the hard parts of collaboration should feel like flipping a switch.
There is a reason the pitch lands. Collaboration is the feature users notice only when it is missing, and the feature engineers dread because it never stays simple. A comment box invites a notification system. A notification system invites read state, then permissions, then an activity log, then a webhook so some other tool can listen in. Presence invites cursors, cursors invite conflict resolution, conflict resolution invites the genuinely difficult math of letting two people type in the same place at the same time without one of them losing a sentence. Velt's bet is that this whole staircase belongs behind one API, maintained by a team that does nothing else.
Like Okta is to Auth and Algolia is to Search, Velt is to Collaboration.
Contextual comments, pins, area comments and reactions - pinned to the exact place in your app where the conversation belongs.
Live presence, named cursors and huddles so users can see each other working, the way a shared room feels alive.
Conflict-free multiplayer editing that plays nicely with YJS, Tiptap and Lexical - the hardest part, handled.
In-app and cross-channel notifications plus webhooks, so the right person hears about the right change at the right time.
Async recordings and activity logs that turn fast-moving work into something you can replay and audit later.
SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-BAA, with permissions management and content security - collaboration enterprises can actually approve.
The companies Velt likes to be measured against are not other comment widgets. They are the category-defining picks-and-shovels firms of the last decade. Stripe decided that taking a credit card should be a few lines of code instead of a six-month bank integration. Twilio did it for phone calls and text messages. Okta did it for the login screen. Algolia did it for search. Each one took something every product needed, something miserable to build well, and turned it into a billing relationship.
Goyal is making the same argument about collaboration. The timing is not accidental. Software has spent the last few years becoming multiplayer by default - design files you edit together, documents that show who else is in the room, dashboards a whole team annotates. Users now arrive expecting the green dot and the shared cursor. The gap between what users expect and what most teams can afford to build is exactly the space Velt is selling into.
And the early returns Velt cites are about engagement, not vanity. Customers have reported figures like a 10% lift in engagement and a 26% increase in weekly active users after adding collaborative features. The logic is intuitive: when work is something you do with other people inside a product, you come back to that product more often. Collaboration is not a feature bolted onto retention. In a lot of cases it is the retention.
Velt is building the collaboration infrastructure for the internet.
Goyal's path does not read like a straight line drawn by a recruiter. He started with a Bachelor of Commerce in marketing from St. Xavier's College, then later collected certificates in disruptive strategy from Harvard Business School Online and advanced project management from Stanford. The classic founder origin myth skips the commerce degree. His does not.
Then came roughly nine years at Google. He worked as a product manager across augmented reality in Maps and Search, Payments, Access and the Next Billion Users effort - the initiative aimed at the people coming online for the first time. He also trained colleagues in design thinking. It is a resume built less around a single product than around a single instinct: making powerful technology feel usable to people who did not build it.
In 2020 he and co-founder Solène Oudet, also ex-Google, started a company. Its first form was Superflow, a tool that let marketing and design teams leave comments directly on live websites. The seed of the bigger idea was already there - collaboration where the work actually lives. Superflow grew up into Velt, the general-purpose collaboration stack, and the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch.
The pivot is the part worth pausing on. Superflow solved a real but narrow problem - feedback on a website. Velt took the hard machinery underneath it, the comments and notifications and presence, and generalized it into something any developer could embed anywhere. That move, from a single-use product to a horizontal platform, is the kind of decision that quietly separates a tidy little tool from infrastructure. Goyal chose infrastructure.
His Google years map onto that choice almost too neatly. Augmented reality in Maps and Search is, at its heart, a problem of layering useful information onto something people already understand. Velt does the conversational version: layering presence, comments and live editing onto products people already use. Next Billion Users was about meeting people where they are, with technology that does not demand a manual. The throughline of his career is not a single product. It is a refusal to make users do the heavy lifting.
Joins Google, starting nearly a decade across product and operations.
PM on AR in Maps & Search, Payments, Access and Next Billion Users; design-thinking trainer.
Co-founds the company with Solène Oudet - first as Superflow, comments on live websites.
Accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch.
Announces $2.77M seed to scale the Velt collaboration SDK.
Velt becomes the collaboration stack for B2B SaaS; AI plugins for Cursor and Claude arrive.
"Nothing great was ever built alone. Technology has made the world a small place."
"Like Okta is to Auth and Algolia is to Search, Velt is to Collaboration."
Winter 2022. The stamp that opened the door and the network behind it.
Spider Capital, Amino Capital and First Row Partners anchored the seed round.
Operators and angels from companies that know infrastructure when they see it.
Infrastructure companies do not get fireworks. Nobody tweets a screenshot of the auth layer working. The reward for doing the hard, invisible thing correctly is that it disappears - users feel the collaboration, not the SDK underneath it. That is the deal Velt has signed up for, and Goyal's framing suggests he is comfortable with it. The newest chapter leans into where developers actually spend their days now: Velt's AI plugins can scaffold collaboration features straight from tools like Cursor and Claude, shrinking the integration from a few minutes to barely a prompt.
It is a long way from a commerce classroom at St. Xavier's to building the connective tissue for software made by strangers across the world. But the line he keeps repeating ties the two ends together. Nothing great was ever built alone, he says, and technology has made the world a small place. From him it is less a slogan than a product spec. Velt is the attempt to make that smallness feel native to every app you open - so that working together stops being a feature teams have to build and becomes simply how software behaves.