Akash Sharma

Akash Sharma is co-founder and CEO of Vellum, a platform for building and running production AI applications. He started it in 2023 with Sidd Seethepalli and Noa Flaherty, colleagues from the recruiting startup Dover.

Leaving India for College in California

"I grew up in India and I did high school there in Mumbai, India," Sharma said on the Born in Silicon Valley podcast, at the Dhirubhai Ambani School. He moved to the United States for college at UC Berkeley in California. After graduating, he joined McKinsey's Silicon Valley office to learn how business is done at scale, and spent five years there.

Writing Job Descriptions with GPT-3 at Dover

At Dover, a recruiting software company from Y Combinator, the team built applications on early language models. Their first was a job description writer that turned a few lines about the role and company into a full posting, he said. Seethepalli had been a founding engineer at Dover, according to Y Combinator.

Building Software in Quicksand

"Developing AI feels like writing software in quicksand," Sharma said in a line quoted by YesPress, which lists Vellum in Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and based in New York, New York. Announcing the company's $20 million Series A, he wrote that teams were learning "it's one thing to build a demo and another thing entirely to get it production-ready."