Vela

What it is

Vela is an AI recruiting coordinator that you add to a conversation rather than a scheduling tool you log into. You CC it on an email thread, or loop it into SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, or a phone call, and it reads the context, checks calendars, proposes times, chases whoever has gone quiet, reschedules when a conflict appears, and sends the confirmed invite. For recruiting it also attaches the resume to the invite, books prep calls, and collects interviewer feedback. There is no candidate portal and no dashboard for the hiring manager to learn; the interface is the thread.

The San Francisco company was founded by brothers Gobhanu and Saatvik Korisepati and went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, with CRV and Rebel Fund named as backers; no priced round has been disclosed. It launched on Hacker News in March 2026 as a general scheduling agent and relaunched on Product Hunt in July 2026 as “the AI Recruiting Coordinator,” with executive search and staffing as the beachhead. Vela lists Netflix, LinkedIn, SanDisk, Zoox, Scale AI, and AWS as users and says it schedules thousands of meetings a week. Those are vendor claims; it has no reviews on G2 or Capterra yet.

Vela is not an interview-loop optimizer. It does not assemble a six-person onsite from interviewer pools, balance interviewer load, or enforce panel rules. That is what GoodTime and ModernLoop do. Vela does the back-and-forth a human coordinator does in the inbox.

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

• The work lives in threads with people outside your company. In executive search and agency recruiting, an interview involves a candidate, a client hiring manager, and a recruiter who share no calendar system. Loop optimizers assume internal interviewers whose calendars you can read. Vela assumes you can’t read the other side’s calendar and negotiates by message, which is how search firms actually schedule.
• No change management. Nobody installs anything. A partner CCs Vela the way they would CC a coordinator. For a 10-person search boutique with no ops function, that is the difference between adopting a tool and not.
• Channel coverage for the chase. Candidates who ignore email answer SMS or WhatsApp. Vela follows up across channels, which attacks the most common stall in the process: the multi-day gap waiting on one reply.

Pricing

• No public price. Vela sells through a demo and publishes no plan, seat price, or trial terms. One software directory lists a free tier; the vendor does not confirm it.
• The anchor below: Howie, the horizontal CC-an-assistant tool, launched at $25 and $95 per user per month (GeekWire, 2025).
• The anchor above: enterprise loop schedulers run roughly $200–500 per coordinator per month at mid-market scale, with 30–60-day implementations (estimate, per our GoodTime and ModernLoop entries).
• Real-world cost: expect a Vela quote between those anchors, scaled by interview volume rather than seats (estimate). The number to compare it against is a coordinator’s loaded salary. If Vela absorbs a meaningful share of one coordinator’s week, a low four-figure monthly contract pays back. If your team schedules 20 interviews a month, it does not.

Best for

Executive-search firms, agency and staffing recruiters, and in-house TA teams hiring senior roles, where each interview is negotiated by message across external parties and a coordinator or partner loses hours a week to back-and-forth. The ROI band is search firms and agency desks with roughly 5–50 recruiters.

Do not buy Vela if your pain is assembling internal multi-round onsite loops with interviewer rotation. Buy GoodTime or ModernLoop. Skip it too if you run under 20 interviews a month, where Calendly or your ATS’s native scheduling covers the job, or if you need a vendor with a named ATS write-back and a multi-year track record before software emails your candidates.

Versus the alternatives

• GoodTime: the enterprise incumbent. Pick it for 50+ internal loops a month, interviewer load balancing, and deep Greenhouse or Workday write-back. Vela wins when the other parties sit outside your calendar system.
• ModernLoop: the mid-market loop optimizer, with the same pick rule as GoodTime and a faster setup.
• Paradox: now a Workday company. Pick it for high-volume hourly hiring where a conversational assistant schedules thousands of applicants straight from the apply flow. Vela is built for low-volume, high-stakes interviews.
• Calendly or Ashby’s native scheduling: pick a booking link when the candidate can self-select a slot and there is one calendar to check. It costs little or nothing and breaks down at three or more parties.
• Howie: the horizontal peer, with 1,000+ paying customers at its 2025 launch. Pick it for one executive’s calendar at a published price. Vela wins on recruiting steps (resume on the invite, prep calls, feedback chasing) and on SMS, WhatsApp, and phone.

If none fit because you schedule a handful of senior interviews a month, a part-time human coordinator still beats any contract. The role Vela automates is defined in recruiting coordinator; for a do-it-yourself build, see the interview scheduling resolver for n8n.

Watch-outs

• An early-stage vendor with an agent that emails your candidates. Vela launched in 2026, runs a small team, and has no third-party reviews. Its terms provide the service “as is” and delete customer content on termination. Guard: pilot on one desk or one search for 30 days, stay CC’d on every thread, and write a data-export right into the contract so a vendor failure doesn’t strand scheduling mid-search.
• Errors land in front of candidates and clients. Vela’s terms state that AI output can be wrong and that you remain responsible for reviewing it. Guard: for the first 2–4 weeks, keep a human on client-facing and C-level threads, and track reschedule and no-show rates against your pre-Vela baseline.
• No named ATS integration. Vela’s site and launch materials name channels and calendars, not ATS write-back. Guard: ask in the demo exactly which ATS (Greenhouse, Ashby, Bullhorn, Loxo) receives interview events. If the answer is none, budget for manual stage updates or an n8n bridge.
• SMS consent is your obligation. The terms require you to obtain express consent before Vela messages anyone, keep consent records for at least 4 years, and honor opt-outs within 24 hours. Guard: capture SMS opt-in on your intake or application form before enabling the channel, and keep compensation details off SMS.
• It reads your inbox. The privacy policy covers processing message content and calendar details. It says third-party AI providers are contractually barred from training on your data, but names no model subprocessors and sets no retention period. Guard: request the SOC 2 report and the subprocessor list, and connect a dedicated recruiting mailbox rather than a partner’s full inbox.