Vala Investor Update | August 2026

Current contracted ARR is approximately $98K.

The headline number has remained relatively flat because expansion within stronger-fit customers has largely offset churn and pauses from several earlier customers that were not ideal long-term fits.

The composition is improving. Customers are adopting White Label, moving into Grow, and increasing their reliance on Vala as their volume grows.

Lorain has already been included in contracted ARR since contract execution. Receiving payment this month does not increase ARR, but it moves the relationship from signed institutional contract to paid institutional deployment.

Colorado is not included in current ARR. Its proposed pilot is approximately $46K for three months, and our latest discussions contemplate a broader annual relationship at roughly $184K following the pilot.

At the approximately $184K annual level currently contemplated, Vala would move from roughly $98K to approximately $282K in contracted ARR.

One of our biggest lessons this summer is that implementation is part of product success.

For the organizations we serve, new software is consequential. It changes how people intake veterans, manage claims, communicate, collaborate, document work, measure performance, and ultimately deliver services.

Adoption cannot be an afterthought.

We're now scoping implementation engagements of approximately $1,500 to $5,000, depending on complexity, to handle migrations, workflow configuration, training, and operational setup.

We want Vala to be the easy button.

But our strongest selling point goes beyond implementation.

Customers don't only get Vala. They get us.

We work as an extension of their team. We learn how their organization operates, solve problems alongside them, translate their workflows into Vala, and feed those lessons directly back into the product.

Our institutional customers are bringing the same commitment.

Lorain and Colorado are not treating Vala like passive software trials. Their teams are investing time, operational change, internal credibility, and their own reputations into these deployments alongside us.

Customers are not merely buying from Vala. They are building with Vala.

That creates a flywheel:

Implementation → outcomes → trust → expansion and referrals → deeper knowledge → better product and implementation.

NASDVA was our most strategically valuable conference to date.

A large share of the states we spoke with still rely on long-standing systems such as VetPro or Vetraspec, now owned by Tyler Technologies, and a meaningful number are evaluating alternatives.

There is an installed base, a replacement cycle, and buyers looking for something better.

More importantly, we're seeing how one deployment distributes the next.

Lorain is our county reference model.

Their team is willing to serve as a reference, we're building directly alongside them, and the relationship is already expanding beyond claims into Financial Assistance and Transportation.

Ohio has 88 counties.

We do not count the remaining 87 as pipeline. But many operate with similar responsibilities, economics, and legacy systems. At roughly $30K to $50K in annual value per county depending on scope, a repeatable county model creates a meaningful expansion path.

The real leverage is referenceability.

The next county does not have to evaluate a slide deck. It can talk to another Ohio county using Vala and see how the platform changes actual operations.

Colorado is the state reference model we are standing up now, with the pilot scheduled to begin September 28.

The $46K, three-month deployment is designed to demonstrate the state-level model, including a re-audit of roughly 140,000 historical claimants.

We’re also planning to involve counties early so we can test the state platform across the organizations that actually serve veterans locally, rather than treating the pilot as a closed state-level exercise.

Just as importantly, we're instrumenting the deployment from Day 1. We want to measure adoption, workflow impact, claimant opportunities, and operational outcomes throughout the pilot so the value is demonstrated in data, not anecdotes.

The ROI case is much larger than administrative efficiency. Vala can help Colorado improve future claims while also revisiting veterans it has already served and identifying records that warrant another look because of overlooked conditions, new evidence, changes in law or policy, or other legitimate opportunities.

We do not yet know how many additional opportunities the re-audit will surface. That is what the deployment will measure.

The flywheel is clear:

Better intelligence → additional veteran opportunities →
measurable veteran and regional economic impact →
demonstrated organizational ROI → deeper adoption →
stronger reference deployment.

Wyoming, New Mexico, and North Dakota have already expressed interest in observing the Colorado demonstration. Wyoming has now moved a step further, with a deeper Vala evaluation scheduled for September 11 and continued discussion around observing the rollout.

None of those states are committed customers today, but the reference path is already working.

Lorain is the county domino. Colorado is the state domino. We are already seeing the next conversations form around both. Our job now is execution, measurement, and replication.

Our AI North Star is clear:

As foundation models improve, Vala should make expert-quality VA claims strategy and execution available regardless of the experience of the person operating the platform.

We do not need to predict which general-purpose foundation model wins.

Vala is being designed to benefit from the best models available while increasingly developing proprietary domain intelligence of our own.

Through Vala Labs, we're building the domain intelligence, structured data, legal and regulatory context, workflows, evaluation systems, institutional knowledge, permissions, and orchestration around those models.

We’re also nearing the first iteration of Vala 1, our effort to build increasingly specialized intelligence for the VA benefits domain. The goal is not to recreate a general-purpose frontier model. It is to build intelligence optimized around the workflows, knowledge, evidence, and outcomes that matter here.

August also included one of our broadest product expansions yet, spanning legal research, workflow automation, collaboration, intake, operational visibility, and the infrastructure underneath them. The important part is not the number of features. It is that these capabilities increasingly reinforce one another around the same persistent veteran and organizational context.

Community Edition also went live this month, giving veteran-serving organizations a free entry point into Vala through tools such as e-signatures, calculators, and the Vala Network. That gives us another path into the ecosystem while the full platform remains the paid workflow, intelligence, and collaboration layer.

Our goal is for Vala to become the trusted easy button for the veterans benefits ecosystem.

Vala should understand the veteran, understand the claim, understand the organization helping them, determine what needs to happen next, and orchestrate the right AI capabilities, people, and workflows to produce the work.

Complexity underneath. Simplicity for the user.

Whether the intelligence comes from a frontier model, a specialized Vala model, or a combination of both, Vala should orchestrate the right capability for the job.

The same thesis extends to the Vala Network, where attorneys, agents, VSOs, specialists, counties, states, veterans, and others can collaborate while preserving organizational boundaries, permissions, privacy, and data ownership.

AI capabilities will continue improving and commoditizing.

Trusted relationships, workflow ownership, domain knowledge, institutional intelligence, proprietary models, and collaboration density are harder to reproduce.

Every improvement in AI should make Vala better, not less differentiated.

We're applying the same philosophy internally.

I currently carry meaningful parts of the CEO, CPO, COO, CRO, CMO, and CFO functions.

Across those areas, I know what excellent execution looks like.

One of the most consequential things we've done is codify more of that judgment so it does not remain dependent on me.

We have formalized North Stars, institutional knowledge, operating principles, review systems, decision frameworks, and recurring workflows. Every teammate increasingly has an AI-augmented operating environment around them, but those systems draw from the same shared body of Vala knowledge.

The goal is shared organizational intelligence.

When one part of the company learns something durable, the rest of Vala should benefit. New customer insight should improve future implementation. Product decisions should preserve their reasoning. Operating lessons should improve future execution.

Even our product-development operations are becoming increasingly software-defined, with more classification, routing, duplicate detection, and governance happening automatically.

The result is unusually high output relative to our headcount.

We're not optimizing for minimum headcount.

We're optimizing for maximum leverage per person.

We currently have approximately four months of runway at our present burn rate, with available levers to extend that beyond five months through customer receipts and additional burn reductions.

That is enough to execute our next major institutional milestones.

It is not enough to fully capitalize on the demand and expansion those milestones are positioned to generate.

Lorain is our county reference deployment. Colorado is the state reference deployment we are standing up. Larger commercial customers are simultaneously asking us to prioritize deeper implementations and product build-outs around their operations.

As these deployments demonstrate their value, we expect referenceability to create additional opportunities across counties and states while larger commercial customers simultaneously pull us deeper into their operations. The early signs of both are already visible.

We need the capacity to absorb that growth without sacrificing the customer involvement, implementation quality, and product velocity that helped us earn this level of trust in the first place.

That is why we're raising now.

The capital gives us runway to execute these deployments correctly, match the seriousness of our customers' commitments with the attention they deserve, support the customers and referrals they generate, and turn demonstrated outcomes into repeatable revenue.

It also gives us capacity to pursue high-leverage opportunities such as SBIR and other non-dilutive R&D funding, government contracting vehicles, and IDIQ pathways without pulling the core team away from paying customers.

At the same time, we're investing in systems that make future growth cheaper through AI-augmented operations, automation, smarter model routing, and lower-cost or self-hosted capabilities where our evaluations show they make sense.

The round is not simply buying more months. It is buying the time and capacity to turn today's validation into repeatable growth, absorb the demand our reference deployments generate, and make future growth increasingly capital efficient.

We're not raising to discover whether institutional customers want Vala.

We're raising to turn committed deployments into demonstrated outcomes, and demonstrated outcomes into repeatable growth.

September is stacked.

We'll be in Portland, Sept. 8–13 for the National Association for Black Veterans (NABVETS) Annual Conference, where Vala has been given a two-hour training session. NABVETS is centrally managed but operates through a decentralized network, giving us dedicated time to train, learn, and demonstrate how Vala can support adoption across the organization.

From there we'll head to Indianapolis, Sept. 15–18, for NOVA, returning to the attorney and accredited-agent community where Vala first found its wedge.

Then we'll be in the Cleveland/Lorain area, Sept. 19–24, attending Lorain County's Military Ball and spending several days onsite implementing, collaborating, and building directly alongside their team.

After Lorain, we'll be in Chicago, Sept. 25–26, for investor meetings.

Then we'll head to Denver the week of Sept. 28 to begin the Colorado pilot and work directly with the state team as we stand up our first state reference deployment.

Within three weeks, Vala will move from a national veterans organization to attorneys and agents, then into a live county deployment, investor meetings, and our first state deployment.

Our next financing round formally begins September 15.

We're beginning to schedule investor conversations for September now. If you'd like to learn more about where Vala is headed, I'd be glad to connect.

If you're in Portland, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, or Denver in September, give us a shout. I'd love to meet in person.

And if there is an investor, government leader, operator, or strategic relationship in one of those markets who should know Vala, introductions would be incredibly helpful.

Our first Vala challenge coins and lapel pins arrived this month.

In the military, challenge coins are traditionally given as a mark of belonging, recognition, and shared service. That felt like the right tradition to carry into Vala.

Founder Coins are gold. Partner Coins are silver. At 2.25 inches across and intentionally substantial, they were designed to feel more like keepsakes than swag.

Partner Coins are reserved for investors, customers, and other partners who have helped build Vala alongside us. Matching Vala lapel pins are for both Founders and Partners.

Current investors and partners should expect to see some of these arriving soon.