A CFO's read should exist on day one

Daniel Reyes spent years running finance and operations at two venture-backed startups. In both of them, he watched talented founders make high-stakes calls on cash without a clear picture of what they actually had. Runway was a spreadsheet nobody updated. Leaks went unnoticed for months. The decisions that mattered most, whether to hire, when to push the fundraise, what to cut, came down to guesswork.

Mara Whitfield had spent the same years building machine learning systems that turn real-world, messy data into decisions. She knew that reading a founder's ledger, vendor name by vendor name, month by month, is a language problem. A rules engine breaks the moment a vendor renames itself or a charge lands in the wrong month. A language model reads intent.

Together, they started Vael to answer one question: what if every founder had the read a good CFO gives, from day one?

Our mission

Vael's mission is to give every founder an honest, plain-language read of their money whenever they need it. Not a dashboard full of charts. Not financial advice. A copilot: the read and the reasons, so the founder can make the call.

Built AI-native. A language model is the engine at the center of everything Vael does. Reading a real ledger, with its odd vendor names, duplicated tools, and one-off charges misread as recurring burn, is a language problem. We built around the model from day one, not around a rule set that breaks when the data gets hard.