llm-applications
(3)
Empires makes a habit of building worlds
A family-made creature collector sits at the heart of this Seattle software studio. Beneath the animal spirits is a practical lesson in making a small team’s work go further.
Alex Leonardi
Alex Leonardi is the co-founder and CEO of VectorShift, a New York no-code AI automation platform that lets teams build enterprise-grade LLM applications, search engines, chatbots and workflows by dragging and dropping instead of coding. A Harvard statistics-and-computer-science graduate who built generative AI capabilities at Blackstone, he launched VectorShift in 2023 through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and raised a $3M seed in February 2024. The company has since sharpened its focus into an AI operating system for private market investors.
Vellum
Vellum is a New York-based AI development platform that helps companies build, evaluate, deploy, and monitor production-grade LLM applications and AI agents. Founded in early 2023 by three engineers who kept hitting the same wall - prototypes that demo well but break in production - Vellum gives teams a workflow builder, an evaluation suite, version-controlled deployments, and live monitoring so they can move AI from proof-of-concept to reliable production systems. The platform works with more than 150 companies including Drata, Redfin, Swisscom, and Headspace, and raised a $20M Series A led by Leaders Fund in July 2025.