Vala Investor Update | July 2026

Hey everyone,

July was about preparing Vala to scale.

Over the past month, we invested heavily in the foundation behind the business, including enterprise readiness, product operations, customer onboarding, automation, and scalable go-to-market systems.

The biggest realization came from our customers themselves. Attorneys and claims agents have always been our first customer, but we're increasingly realizing they were never the destination. They’ve proven to be the entry point into a much broader ecosystem of organizations that all need to collaborate securely around veterans.

That insight is now influencing nearly every strategic decision we make.

This month reinforced that understanding the right customer can be just as valuable as acquiring another one.

Three memberships paused during July. Two organizations had not yet realized sufficient value from the platform, while another temporarily stopped accepting new veterans pending VBMS access.

As our original beta cohort approaches renewal, we also expect additional turnover. We intentionally recruited a broad group of design partners to maximize learning, including low-volume organizations, highly customized practices, and firms with existing internal workflows. That strategy accelerated product development while sharpening our understanding of the customers most likely to realize significant value from Vala.

These conversations also highlighted an onboarding opportunity. Although we provide white glove support and regular customer success calls, the product itself must help users reach value independently.

That insight led directly to a comprehensive navigation refresh, improved onboarding, additional in-app guidance, and a refined user experience now supporting the Community Edition launch.

We also introduced our White Label add-on, allowing firms on our Launch and Growth plans to brand the platform as their own. Early adoption has been encouraging and further reinforces that firms increasingly view Vala as operational infrastructure rather than another standalone application.

Our relationship with Lorain County continues to deepen as implementation progresses. Beyond deployment, we were invited back to continue building alongside their team and honored to attend their annual Military Ball in September. Relationships like these reinforce that enterprise software is built on trust as much as technology.

Momentum with the Colorado Division of Veterans Affairs also continues. While internal OIT reviews have slowed following recent staffing reductions, the team remains highly engaged and eager to move forward.

Those discussions also validated our decision to begin SOC 2 proactively, since certification will be important for expanding beyond a pilot into a broader statewide deployment.

We're also continuing to advance discussions around deeper VA platform integrations as API conversations move forward.

August begins with NASDVA, followed by NOVA in September, creating an exciting opportunity to continue expanding relationships with both state agencies and the legal community.

As organizations evaluate Vala, conversations increasingly focus less on AI features and more on workflow, collaboration, security, and enterprise readiness.

July represented a meaningful evolution in how we think about building Vala.

Internally, we formalized our product operating framework, giving us a more disciplined approach to evaluating customer feedback, prioritizing roadmap decisions, and balancing short-term requests against long-term platform strategy. We also strengthened engineering execution through improved workflows in Linear, expanded automated documentation through Mintlify, and continued building the internal systems that allow product development to scale alongside the business.

Community Edition fundamentally changed how we design the product. Because many future users will discover Vala without first speaking to our team, we completed a major information architecture and navigation refresh, improved onboarding, expanded in-app guidance, and simplified the overall user experience. These investments reduce time to value and make the platform more intuitive from day one.

We also launched our Chrome Extension for VA QuickSubmit, helping users transfer information and supporting documents into the VA submission workflow while we continue pursuing deeper native VA API integrations.

The biggest product realization this month came from conversations around specialists joining the platform. Initially, we viewed specialists as another type of customer. Increasingly, we see them becoming channel partners whose success depends on securely collaborating with accredited representatives already using Vala.

That realization has fundamentally expanded our product strategy. Rather than optimizing workflows within a single organization, we're increasingly designing Vala around secure collaboration across organizations. We believe that shift, more than any individual AI capability, will become one of the platform's most durable competitive advantages.

That same philosophy continues shaping the Vala Network, which is evolving into a professional network purpose-built for the veterans benefits ecosystem. Beyond helping accredited representatives connect and collaborate, it provides many smaller organizations with their first meaningful online presence while creating new opportunities for discovery, referrals, and collaboration across the community.

Much of July focused on increasing leverage across the business.

We completed our migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, providing a much stronger foundation for automation and internal workflows. This migration also unlocked a new generation of internal automations that were difficult to build previously, allowing us to connect operational systems and eliminate repetitive manual work across the business.

One of the biggest lessons this month was recognizing how many operational responsibilities we originally expected to solve through hiring can instead be solved through thoughtful automation.

Rather than adding headcount for repetitive operational work, we're increasingly investing in systems that perform those tasks consistently and reliably. That allows us to reserve future hiring for areas where human judgment, creativity, and customer relationships create the greatest value.

We're also building internal dashboards, strengthening operational visibility, advancing our intellectual property strategy, and preparing future research initiatives that we believe will strengthen Vala's long-term defensibility.

Collectively, these investments aren't about solving today's problems. They're about building systems that continue compounding as the company grows.

With Community Edition complete, our focus has shifted from building the product to building the engine that introduces new users to it.

Over the past month we've built onboarding flows, lifecycle email campaigns, marketing automation, and conversion journeys that will begin rolling out this week. Together, these investments mark our transition from primarily founder-led sales toward a repeatable product-led growth engine. For the first time, we're beginning to build repeatable demand generation alongside founder-led sales.

We're also beginning to test LinkedIn advertising with support from FlyTech, a marketing partner introduced by one of our investors, The LegalTech Fund.

Leverage compounds.

Many of our highest-return investments this month weren't customer-facing features. They were the systems behind the business that continue paying dividends long after they're built.

Collaboration is becoming our strategic differentiator.

AI will continue improving across the industry. Helping trusted organizations collaborate securely remains a fundamentally human problem and one we increasingly believe will differentiate Vala over the long term.

Foundation models are becoming commoditized.

Foundation models continue to improve, making access to advanced AI increasingly commoditized. Rather than viewing that as a threat, we increasingly see it as validation of our strategy. Long-term differentiation will come from owning workflow, enabling collaboration, earning trust, and integrating deeply into the veterans benefits ecosystem.

Build systems before adding people.

One realization this month was that many operational problems I originally expected to solve through hiring can instead be solved through better systems. The more we automate repetitive work, the more intentionally we can hire for judgment, relationships, and creativity rather than administration.

As always, we'd appreciate introductions to: