Founders: Aan Mehta
Aan Mehta has been coding since she was ten, inspired by her father. Unlike the other Year 11 students in her class, when Aan first heard about ChatGPT her next thought wasn't how she could write essays faster. She had already been building and learning robotics: starting STEM clubs, taking her robotics team to nationals and competing in hackathons. Her first action was to obsess over ChatGPT's capabilities and follow the rabbit holes to exciting possibilities. As AI grew, so did her fascination. She ended up shifting from robotics to AI infrastructure and predictive intelligence which Veltora is working on today.
The bottleneck in AI infrastructure isn't access to compute, it's making surrounding infrastructure reliable enough to deliver on customer commitments. Today's data centres are still run on manual processes and fragmented tools. They're built and run without any reliable way to see what's coming. That gap costs months of construction delays, millions in unplanned downtime, and constant scrambling to keep power, cooling and supplies in sync. This gap between infrastructure and reliability is what led Aan to Veltora.
How does one 19-year-old who's only two years into her degree take on such a complicated problem space? By obsessing over the problem and validating intensively. Despite her age, Aan was able to get into rooms with industry experts that deal with the issues day-to-day. Her approach was not to validate the entire problem at once, which often was too complicated to articulate, but rather break into specific operational questions depending on who she was talking to. She spoke with individuals close to the workflows, teams responsible for compute capacity, cloud operators, infrastructure deployment leaders, all giving her pieces to the puzzle that helped shape the validity of the problem space. In a matter of weeks, all the pieces of the puzzle were being analysed, collated and questioned vigorously. She understood what bottlenecks were limiting capacity, what systems were in place for deployment slips, who coordinated the response, how early issues were flagged and the customer consequences that resulted from it. Veltora now addresses the most urgent problems and delivers an intelligence layer that sits across every critical system: cooling aisles, supply chains, and power grids, monitoring, predicting, and acting 24 hours a day.
Despite her impressive ambition and technical talent, it wasn't an easy journey to get here. As a young solo female founder she needed to build trust and credibility quickly, especially in a technical industry. For every call with an industry expert she would over-prepare her research on the person, company and operational problems. Aan leveraged every learning from previous calls to anticipate concerns from operator conversations and bring a veteran's mindset to each call. As a technical founder, this was her hardest learning curve but also where she grew the most.
At 19, Aan feels both the pressure and the drive to do something extraordinary. Many people doubted her early on. Yet Aan had the resilience to sweep the negativity away and continue to tackle one of the world's most daring problems. For Aan, there has always been a clear sense of the kind of work that life should be centred around: the world's most difficult problems that have consequences beyond just one product or company. Veltora wants to make physical infrastructure more dependable and efficient, and easier to operate, eventually removing the barriers to innovation. To get there, Aan is building the predictive intelligence layer running underneath data centres, allowing useful intelligence and computers to actually reach the people and organisations that need it.
