Jordan Dearsley

Jordan Dearsley is co-founder and CEO of Vapi, a developer platform for building voice AI agents. He and his co-founder spent about three years on calendar and meeting tools before a reset in San Francisco, California, led to Vapi.

Selling Fidget Spinners Before Y Combinator

Dearsley studied software engineering at the University of Waterloo and worked at Shopify, Wealthsimple, and Asana, according to a 2023 Ideas Can't Wait interview. He also ran what the show called the second-largest fidget spinner store on Etsy. He and his roommate applied to Y Combinator with an idea from a school project, were accepted, and dropped out.

Iterating Toward Superpowered

After four months of iterating, the team built Superpowered, a calendar app that showed the day's schedule and joined meetings in one click, the interview said. Dearsley later described working on that calendar app for "three, four years." The podcast billed it as three years stuck at $500,000 in revenue.

Resetting in San Francisco in July 2023

Around July 2023 the team decided there was no "big generational company" in the calendar app, he told The Product Market Fit Show, and moved from Toronto, Ontario, to San Francisco. The host summarized what followed: a product launch, $10 million in annual recurring revenue a year later, and a $20 million Series A. Dearsley credited the move itself: "Might as well move to SF, where gravity at least moves in the right direction."

Bessemer Venture Partners led that $20 million Series A in December 2024. Its partners wrote that the two founders iterated so quickly that a feature request made on a Friday evening was often in production on Saturday morning.