Vela raises $500K seed for AI scheduling agents that negotiate on your behalf
What's the deal? VelaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a San Francisco startup building autonomous AI agents for complex meeting coordination, has raised $500,000 in seed funding. Y Combinator and Rebel FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → backed the round. The four-person company went through YC's Winter 2026 batch.
What's the endgame? Vela wants to replace the manual back-and-forth of arranging meetings. Its agents parse multi-turn email threads, juggle time zones, resolve overlapping commitments, and weigh which attendee should flex their availability.
Unlike a personal assistant interface, the agents communicate directly with external participants across voice, chat, and email. "It doesn't just book slots; it negotiates on your behalf," the founders wrote. The system uses machine learning models, LangGraph, and custom in-house memory layers to track preferences and priority patterns over time.
Who's behind it? Vela was co-founded by brothers Gobhanu Sasankar Korisepati, now chief executive officer, and Saatvik Suryajit Korisepati, its president. As teenagers they built microfinance organisation SWIFTmfi, which issued loans across 77 countries. They previously worked at Perplexity, Amazon Web ServicesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and BCG AIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
By the numbers: The $500,000 round sits in roughly the 42nd percentile for deals of its kind — a modest entry-level cheque that leaves Vela to prove traction before raising more. The company is hiring onsite in San Francisco, with technical roles paying up to $300,000.
Why it matters: Vela says it is already used by high-volume schedulers, from enterprise recruiters arranging thousands of multi-party interviews a week to startup chief executives needing coordination at scale. That recruiting focus puts it in a fast-moving market.
The signal: Vela reflects a broader shift from AI that assists recruiters to agents that take on end-to-end hiring tasks. MetaviewDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, for example, raised a $60 million Series C in September 2026 and launched an agent for candidate research, outreach, follow-up, and scheduling. Vela's bet on judgement-heavy coordination — priorities, ambiguity, and chasing replies — is more distinctive than another calendar tool, but it faces larger platforms expanding fast. The open question is whether its claimed time savings translate into sustained enterprise adoption.
Read more: zerogtalent.com
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