# Sam Seely

> Sam Seely is the co-founder and CEO of Knock, a New York-based notification infrastructure company that turned the tedious plumbing of transactional email, push, SMS and in-app messages into an API and workflow engine used by Vercel, Amplitude and others. He and CTO Chris Bell, who met at Frame.io, launched Knock in 2021 and raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures in February 2024, bringing total funding to $18M.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Knock
- **Organizations:** Knock, Frame.io (prior), Percolate (prior)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Undergraduate, Santa Clara University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Knock in 2021, Raised $18M total funding across seed and Series A, Signed customers including Vercel, Amplitude, Hiive, and Betterworks

## Career timeline

- **2007-2011** — Studied at Santa Clara University
- **2010s** — Worked at Percolate; moved from consulting into the product team, pushing a multi-year digital asset management investment over the line
- **late 2010s** — Joined Frame.io (later acquired by Adobe), where he met co-founder Chris Bell
- **2021** — Co-founded Knock with Chris Bell in New York
- **2022** — Appeared on The Yes-code Podcast discussing product notification primitives
- **2024-02** — Announced $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures; disclosed previous $6M seed round from Afore Capital
- **2024-10** — Interviewed on Signal & Trace podcast on building Knock

## Achievements

- Co-founded Knock in 2021
- Raised $18M total funding across seed and Series A
- Signed customers including Vercel, Amplitude, Hiive, and Betterworks
- Built out a workflow-engine-based notification platform used at scale

## Latest updates

- **2024-02** — Announced $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with Afore and Preface Capital participating.
- **2024-03** — Interviewed by AlleyWatch about Knock's product strategy and category creation.
- **2024-10** — Appeared on Signal & Trace podcast discussing the origin story of Knock.
- **2024-11** — Posted on LinkedIn that Knock is hiring across engineering.

## Links

- Website: https://www.samseely.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-seely-669128a/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/samseely

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/sam-seely
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-08