Vela

AI Scheduling Coordinators for Staffing and Recruiting

Winter 2026ActiveB2BB2BRecruitingCalendarAIAI AssistantSan Francisco, CA, USA

Company

Vela is general intelligence for scheduling. We replace $100K+ coordinators by handling multi-stakeholder, cross-timezone scheduling with human-level nuance: knowing which meetings to prioritize, writing back with taste, and booking materially faster at scale. Gobhanu and Saatvik are brothers who scaled a microfinance bank to 77 countries as kids. We previously built at AWS ML + SuperCompute and BCG AI.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

Staffing and recruiting coordination is a massive market — global staffing industry is $650B+ and scheduling/coordination overhead is a real, painful, measurable cost center. ICP is clear: staffing agencies and recruiters doing high-volume interview coordination. Replacing $100K+ coordinators at scale is a compelling ROI story with obvious monetization (per-seat SaaS or per-interview pricing). B2B with clear enterprise expansion path.

Medium Signal

Founder Signal

Gobhanu left Wharton Huntsman (top program) and has thin but interesting experience: 2 months BCG AI, 2 months Perplexity Growth — neither is deep engineering. His SWIFT microfinance nonprofit is impressive for age but not a revenue-generating tech exit. Saatvik's AWS ML Supercompute background is the strongest technical signal here, plus CMU CS + dropped out of UChicago Booth to build — that's commitment. However Gobhanu's LinkedIn shows no real engineering depth and Saatvik's LinkedIn 404'd, so technical depth is partially unverifiable. Together they're a complementary pair but both are very young with limited sustained professional experience.

Low Signal

Competition

This is a crowded space: Calendly, GoodTime, Prelude (acquired by Calendly), Paradox/Olivia, ModernLoop, and general AI scheduling tools all compete here. The multi-stakeholder email-native approach targeting staffing agencies specifically is a differentiator vs. direct-to-employer tools, but the moat is thin — this is fundamentally an AI workflow automation layer that large ATS players (Greenhouse, Lever) or Calendly could absorb. No proprietary data moat or network effects described.

Medium Signal

Product

Website claims 'schedules thousands of interviews each week' with named client logos (Netflix, LinkedIn, Sandisk, Zoox, Scale, Via, Pony.ai) visible on the site — solid social proof for an early-stage company. Live demo shown, multi-channel support (email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, Phone) described with clear workflow. However, no pricing page, no named testimonials with quotes, no revenue numbers, and no case study details visible in the data provided.

OverallB Tier

Vela has a real product with apparent traction (thousands of interviews/week, recognizable company logos), a clear ICP in staffing agencies, and a defensible pain point. The founders are unusually young with mostly internship-level professional experience outside their impressive nonprofit work — Saatvik's AWS ML background is the strongest technical signal but unverifiable due to broken LinkedIn. The core risk is competition: interview scheduling automation is saturated with well-funded players and Calendly/GoodTime/Paradox have years of head start with enterprise contracts. The staffing agency niche is a smart wedge but the moat is unclear. Worth watching if they can show real revenue growth, but currently more execution bet than structural advantage.

Active Founders

Gobhanu Sasankar Korisepati

Founder

Co-founder & CEO of Vela. Left Wharton's Huntsman Program. Previously BCG AI, Perplexity & Deloitte. Founded SWIFTmfi at 14, disbursing $400K+ in interest-free microloans to 3,200+ women across 77 countries. Diana Legacy Award recipient from Prince William; Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholar.

Saatvik Suryajit Korisepati

Founder

Before Vela, Saatvik was an award-winning engineer on AWS's ML Supercompute team. He completed two #1-ranked programs at Carnegie Mellon (CS and Information Systems) in two years with highest honors. A Booth Scholar (MBA/MS CS) and ZFellow, he dropped out of UChicago to build Vela. He co-founded SWIFT, Oman's largest microfinance institution, impacting 74,000+ lives across 77 countries (Diana Award recipient). Filed his first patent at 16.

Vela

TierB Tier

BatchWinter 2026

Team Size4

StatusActive

LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA