Online collaboration has become routine thanks to productivity apps like Google Docs and the team design platform Figma, among others, but there are still plenty of web-connected apps where users can’t interact with colleagues, add notes, or otherwise to cooperate with each other. This is something called a new startup Velt wants to fix that by releasing a toolkit that allows any developer to add collaborative features to their app in less than 30 minutes.
The Y Combinator-backed startup says it’s leveling the playing field by letting developers pick and choose which collaborative features they need, whether it’s contextual annotations like in Google Docs, Figma-style live descriptions, Loom-style recording features, or Slack-style chats . To support its journey, the startup has raised $2.77 million in seed funding to accelerate its plans.
Launched last year as part of YC’s Winter ’22 batch, Velt was founded by former Google Product Manager Rakesh Goyal, who previously worked on Google’s AR team before leaving to develop his own startup. Initially, he had focused on a different idea when he left Google in 2020, but then the COVID pandemic happened, which shut everything down. As he continued to work with a fully remote and distributed team, he found that experience was lacking.
“I was used to tools like Google Docs and Sheets, which are already very collaborative. But outside, I was surprised to see that most tools are not like that,” explains Goyal. “You have to constantly take screenshots to work with other people, and that didn’t make sense to me.”
Instead of being able to share and collaborate natively, that is, his team members were taking screenshots and sharing them through Slack, which meant the original apps lacked engagement and their users suffered, Goyal says. Another problem he identified was that collaborative features tend to be expensive and difficult for developers to build and maintain over time.
As a result of their experiences, the team turned to building a set of developer tools that would “blur the lines between in-person and online experiences,” says Goyal.
With Velt’s JS SDK, developers can choose the features they want to add to their platform — whether it’s commenting, chats, or video or voice recording — and then customize the user interface to meet their needs.
The features are also powered by artificial intelligence in some cases, such as with the recording feature where the transcript is automatically generated and a summary of the text is provided. AI is also used to categorize the different comments left on a project. For example, it might flag comments with tags like “feature request,” “comments,” or “bug.”
A third AI feature is called “contextual copilot,” which Goyal describes as a collaborative human-AI experience where you can use prompts to do things like rewrite copy when you’re working on a website design tool, for example; or further down the road, redesign the webpage itself, edit video, or interact with other data you see on the screen, depending on the application.
Today, Goyal says Velt’s primary use cases are in three verticals: creative tools, business analytics tools, and CRM tools. In the first category, you’ll find things like website builders, video editors, and video creation tools.
Image Credits: Velt example
Business apps might include things like Mixpanel or Amplitude (which aren’t clients), while CRM or task management tools round out the third category as those where people might want to have conversations about projects or ideas that work.
The company also offers another product called Superflow which is the helper tool for its SDK and is aimed at marketing companies who want to collaborate on design and marketing assets such as websites, videos or PDF files with their clients.
The startup won’t disclose its number of customers (it’s approaching triple digits) or its revenue, but says the company has doubled revenue in the past two months. Goyal notes that some of Velt’s largest customers have over a million monthly users of their apps in the US, which requires custom pricing on top of standard usage-based pricing. Otherwise, pricing starts at $999 per month for up to 5,000 monthly active users.
Velt’s website includes HR analytics software eqtble, design platform awesomic, website building platform zoomforth, and knowledge management software, among others. Velt’s customers are split fairly evenly between Superflow and its SDK, although the sales cycle for the latter is larger.
Image Credits: Amazing using Velt
Velt’s first-round investors, which closed last March, include YC, Spider Capital, Amino Capital, First Row Partners and angel investors from Google, Stripe, SAP and others. The 10-person team, meanwhile, is distributed remotely across three countries, including the US, the UK and India.
Goyal notes that artificial intelligence will play a big role in the startup’s efforts going forward.
“Artificial intelligence is going to become a very important part, and we have a large part of our roadmap dedicated to that, where we will not only enhance human-to-human collaboration through AI, but also enhance human-AI collaboration in the context of “, says [and] through better AI features integrated into existing collaboration experiences,” adds Goyal.
