vellum-ai
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Akash Sharma
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
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.