The collaboration layer the internet forgot - dropped into any app with a few lines of code.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA. The geodesic sphere that serves as Velt's mark - a lattice of triangles standing in for a web where every app finally talks back. Founded 2020. Y Combinator, Winter 2022.
Open almost any app you use for work. You can do things. You can rarely do them with someone else, in the same place, at the same time. Velt noticed the gap - and decided to sell the missing half.
There is a small, familiar frustration built into most software. You are looking at a screen. A colleague is looking at the same screen, somewhere else. And there is no way to point at the thing, leave a note on it, or watch each other's cursors move. Google Docs solved this for documents. Figma solved it for design. Everyone else, it turns out, was left to rebuild that magic from scratch - or not bother.
Velt is the company betting that "not bother" is no longer good enough. Its product is a full-stack SDK: a set of drop-in components and APIs that let a product team add contextual comments, live presence, notifications, async recordings, video huddles, and conflict-free multiplayer editing to their own app. The pitch is refreshingly unglamorous - do this in days, not months, and skip building realtime infrastructure and compliance plumbing you were never excited about anyway.
The person behind it is Rakesh Goyal, who spent nine years as a product manager at Google and helped launch augmented reality in Google Maps and Search before leaving in 2020. He gathered a team heavy with other ex-Googlers and pointed them at a deceptively simple observation: collaboration is a feature every product wants and almost none want to build. Velt would build it once, properly, and rent it out.
The complete collaboration toolkit for SaaS - embed collaboration in days, not months.
The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and, in March 2022, closed a $2.77M seed round with Y Combinator, Spider Capital, Amino Capital, First Row Partners, and angels from Google, Stripe, and SAP. By late 2023 it was approaching a three-digit customer count and, by its own account, had doubled revenue in the two months before a TechCrunch profile went to print. Not a rocket. A steady climb by a small team that knew exactly which problem it was solving.
Velt breaks collaboration into parts you can pick up individually - or all at once.
Multi-threaded, contextual notes on any element - pin, area, and inline comments with @mentions and file attachments.
Avatars, live cursors, selection, and follow mode. See who's here and exactly where they are looking.
CRDT-based concurrent editing so several people can change the same content without stepping on each other.
In-app plus multi-channel alerts across email, Slack, and Teams to keep everyone in the loop.
Voice, video, and screen captures with AI-generated transcripts for feedback that doesn't need a meeting.
Embedded audio/video calls - jump on a quick call without ever leaving the product.
Suggestions, staged approval flows, immutable audit trails, memory for precedent, and AI review agents.
Velt started as a general collaboration kit. As AI began writing more of the work - code, copy, designs - the company sharpened its pitch into something more pointed: a review-and-approval layer where, in its own words, AI and humans review together and work only ships once a human approves.
It is a tidy reframing. The same primitives - comments, suggestions, audit trails - become the connective tissue of governance. Not "collaboration for its own sake," but a checkpoint between a machine's first draft and a human's final yes.
AI and humans review together, and work only ships once a human approves.
Product and engineering teams at B2B SaaS companies lean on Velt so they don't have to build - and maintain - collaboration themselves. Publicly referenced names include:
Reported approaching a three-digit customer count · 500k+ reviews in production.
Rakesh Goyal leaves Google - and its AR team - to build the collaboration layer he wished existed everywhere.
Velt joins the YC W22 batch, sharpening the SDK-for-collaboration thesis.
Closes seed funding with YC, Spider Capital, Amino Capital, First Row Partners, and notable angels.
Approaching a three-digit customer count; revenue reported to have doubled in two months.
Ships an AI agent that scaffolds real-time collaboration into an app in about ten minutes.
Repositions around review, approval, audit, and AI review agents - governance for the AI era.
What it feels like: frame-by-frame comments on a video player, live cursors gliding across a canvas, an @mention that pings a teammate in Slack. The demos are less about spectacle and more about a quiet realization - your app could just do this.
Velt keeps a public gallery of use cases and sample apps, plus documentation aimed squarely at developers who want to wire it up and move on.
Now a colleague's cursor drifts across the screen. There's a comment pinned to the exact thing you were both squinting at. Someone left a thirty-second recording instead of scheduling a call, and an approval is sitting one click away. Nothing about the app changed except the part that always felt missing.
That is the whole idea. Velt didn't set out to build another product - it set out to make everyone else's products a little less lonely. A geodesic sphere for a logo, a small team spread across three countries, and a bet that software is better when it's built for more than one.