Akash Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of Vellum, a New York-based enterprise AI development platform that helps teams build, evaluate, and ship production-grade LLM applications. A UC Berkeley graduate who spent five years at McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, he started Vellum in 2023 with two MIT engineers he met at the startup Dover. The company went through Y Combinator (W23), raised $25M+ to date including a $20M Series A in July 2025, and works with 150+ companies from Redfin and Drata to Cursor and Headspace. Sharma is known for talking to thousands of teams running LLMs in production and openly sharing what he learns.
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.