Enterprise AI development platform Vellum raises $20M to help businesses deploy apps faster – News

Vocify Inc., also known as Vellum, a leading enterprise development platform for building, testing and deploying artificial intelligence-powered applications, today announced it raised $20 million in early-stage funding to expand its product portfolio and grow in the market.

The company’s Series A funding round was led by Leaders Fund, with participation from Socii Capital and returning investors Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund and Eastlink Capital.

Vellum provides a powerful cross-functional interface that allows both highly technical developers and non-technical employees a way to quickly prototype AI applications by either building from a visual user interface using nodes and low-code or writing code directly and connecting to a large language model.

“Generative AI has captured the imagination of nearly every industry, but turning that potential into reliable, production-ready systems remains a massive challenge,” said Akash Sharma, co-founder and chief executive at Vellum. “For many teams, it still feels like guesswork. Vellum changes that.”

The company’s platform also delivers all the infrastructure to host in the cloud, or locally, for connecting AI models, tools and business data in one place to streamline from prototype to production. This includes development workflow orchestration, evaluation, experimentation, and testing, as well as deploying and monitoring after the application has been deployed.

“We believe true test-driven development is the standard AI teams need to build systems they can trust and control as they grow,” said Sharma. “Every part of our platform is designed around this principle.”

The idea behind Vellum is to allow teams to work together on AI applications irrespective of technical expertise. The canvas is highly customizable with out-of-the-box nodes for common AI operations, including prompts and tools, such as retrieval augmented generation, image scanning and the ability to define custom nodes.

Essentially, engineers and developers receive access to a software development kit they can import into their development environments, where they can directly control and edit code; whereas, product managers and domain experts can use the visual builder to shape AI behavior without writing any code. This collaborative landscape means that everyone works in the same space, sharing the same view, but from different perspectives and can synchronize their teamwork.

Vellum already boasts several big customers, including Drata Inc., Swisscom AG, Redfin Corp. and Headspace, which have used the platform to build AI applications for numerous use cases, including customer support to content generation agents.

Swisscom is Switzerland’s leading telecommunications provider and a major IT company. Vellum said the company made its platform a core part of its AI platform, providing Swiss banks and governments a secure and reliable way to build AI apps.

“Vellum has been a force multiplier for our AI efforts; their test-driven approach helps us catch regressions early and iterate quickly,” said Lior Solomon, vice president of engineering at Drata, which provides enterprise-grade security and compliance automation for businesses.

Sharma said with the new funding, Vellum is poised to increase the number of AI use cases deployed through the platform, lower the time to production for apps built on its infrastructure, expand its presence in the market and innovate on its existing product stack.

“We’re building not just software, but the standard of how the world builds AI products,” said Sharma. “For everyone venturing beyond prototypes where quality and reliability matter, Vellum is your foundation.”

Image: Vellum