The pitch
Vela, in 13 slides
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Vela
We turn a small business's scattered, fragmented marketing into one autonomous CMO that runs it all — for a SaaS price.
Airwallex Latitude 37 · sailvela.ai · 2026
Problem
Every business needs a CMO. Almost none can afford one.
400 million small businesses run Google and Meta with no marketer. They know the work needs doing — they have no time, no team, and no certainty to act. So it sits. Today's tools sell them more dashboards and more recommendations: more work, not execution.
$275–500K
a full-time CMO / yr
$5–15K/mo fractional · Averi 2025
56%
have ≤ 1 hr/day
of SMB owners, for marketing · 2025
3 in 4
aren't sure it works
no measurement, no hands · LocaliQ 2025
Solution
An autonomous AI CMO.
Vela connects every platform, finds what's costing you across SEO, AI search, paid and social, and acts — fixing issues, managing campaigns, and generating the content (posts and UGC videos) for new ones, all behind guardrails you control.
Detect
the gaps + the money, every channel
Create
posts, UGC videos + fixes, in your voice
Run
publish, manage campaigns, undo — gated
Why now
Three curves just crossed.
AI can act, cheaply
Agentic AI is going from $5.2B (2024) to $196.6B (2034), 43.8% CAGR. Models are finally capable enough to take real actions, not just write text.
Market.us 2025
The pipes are open
Search Console, Google Ads and Meta APIs are mature and stable — a managed product can read and write the whole stack.
Discovery fractured
AI Overviews cut the top result's clicks ~58%, and discovery scattered to Reddit, short-form video (TikTok/Reels/Shorts) and LinkedIn — which AI answers now cite more than anyone. No SMB can be everywhere, in every format, by hand.
Ahrefs · Search Engine Land 2026
Market — bottom up
A $130B+ software market, underserved at the SMB tier.
TAM
$130B+
SEO, content, social and paid software — growing double digits. SEO alone $85B→$266B; content marketing ~13.5% CAGR toward ~$1T.
Precedence · Mordor 2025
SAM
$20B+
~20M digitally-active SMBs already on Google + Meta and buying marketing software, at ~$1–3K/yr each.
Vela estimate
SOM
Beachhead
Indie founders & solo-to-10-person SaaS / e-commerce in AU, US and UK on GSC + Ads + Meta.
~400M small businesses worldwide. Vela rides the AI-agents wave — ~$8B → ~$50B by 2030, ~44% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets · BCC 2025).
Product — one loop, every channel
A closed loop, running on your real data.
- 01
Connect
every channel
- 02
Detect
gaps + $ at stake
- 03
Create
posts, videos + fixes
- 04
Gate
risk + guardrails
- 05
Run
publish, manage, undo
One loop runs every channel: connect your stack, detect the gaps and the money, create the content and the fixes in your voice — posts, UGC videos and on-page changes — clear your guardrails, then publish, launch and tune the campaigns — SEO, AI search, paid and social, with a full inbox, decision journal and autonomy dial.
Business model
Priced on autonomy and spend managed — not seats.
Free
$0
Connect, detect, and ship Tier-0 fixes. The wedge — value before the card.
Pro
$49–99/mo
Full SEO + GEO autonomy, the decision journal, briefings and Ask Max.
Autopilot
% of spend
Paid execution + the arbitrage brain, priced on the budget Vela manages.
Land free, expand as autonomy and channels grow — ACV rises with the value Vela is trusted to manage.
Moat & defensibility
Two things a better model can't copy.
The organic↔paid arbitrage brain
Vela owns every channel — SEO, AI search, paid AND social/content — and the execution between them, shifting effort to wherever the next customer is cheapest. That cross-channel data + workflow compounds with every account; no rival owns the whole board.
A genuinely-wired trust layer
Risk-tiered autonomy, dry-run diffs, spend caps, a kill switch, an append-only journal and one-click undo — built first, hard to retrofit, and gated on compliance, not engineering. It's what makes autonomy sellable.
Modern AI defensibility is integration depth, proprietary data and execution velocity — not “our model is better.”
Competition
Everyone recommends. Almost nobody executes — with trust.
Okara generates content — even UGC video — but doesn't touch paid or SEO, and its “control” is just draft review. Vela is the only one that manages and executes across SEO, AI search, paid AND social — content, video and campaigns — with a trust layer SMBs can hand the keys to.
Traction & roadmap
Built phase by phase. Launched as the complete CMO.
Phase 1 is built and live in private beta on real Google accounts. The plan: ship every phase — the full autonomous CMO across SEO, paid, content and social — before the public launch, with beta users on real data the whole way.
Shipped solo — Phase 1, live
- ›Multi-tenant app, RLS, encrypted token vault
- ›Google OAuth + Search Console / GA4 ingestion
- ›Six deterministic detectors, ROI-ranked
- ›LLM drafting + the guardrail execution engine
- ›Full UI: inbox, journal, autonomy dial, Ask Max
- ›Live on sailvela.ai, on a real Google account
The hard part — the trustworthy execution layer — is done. Every later phase reuses it: each new channel is just another surface behind the same gate.
- 1Organic SEO & AI searchDetect + autonomously fix on-page; the trust layerBuilt · beta
- 2Cross-channel brainGoogle Ads + Meta read → organic↔paid arbitragePlanned
- 3Paid autopilotBudgets, bids, creative — gated on Google/Meta compliancePlanned
- 4Content & organic socialGenerate posts; publish to Reddit, LinkedIn, X, blogPlanned
- 5UGC videoGenerate short-form video → TikTok, Reels, ShortsPlanned
- 6Unified autonomous CMOOne brain runs + arbitrages every channel, end to endPlanned
- ★Public launchThe complete autonomous CMO — every channel, fully wired
Team
Built by a founder who ships.
William Laverty — designed, built and deployed Phase 1 of Vela solo: the tenancy and security model, the connectors, the detector engine, the LLM layer, the guardrailed execution engine and the full UI — feature-complete and live in beta.
The hard part of an autonomous product isn't the model — it's the trustworthy execution layer around it. That's already done.
The ask
$100K to turn a live product into a business.
Through Airwallex Latitude 37, over the next 12 months:
Convert
design partners → first paying customers on the free→Pro wedge
Ship
Phase 2 — paid execution + the arbitrage brain, through compliance
Prove
retention + ACV expansion as autonomy is trusted with more
Every small business
gets a CMO.