Startups & Venture

Vela Wood was built by entrepreneurs, and we represent founders the way we would want to be represented. Building a company takes far more than turning an idea into revenue. It takes preparation, planning, sacrifice, and the willingness to rethink your strategy when the market shifts. We have helped launch more than 2,000 companies, and guided many of them from initial formation through their growth rounds – relationships that, in a number of cases, now span the better part of a decade.

We represent companies across the full venture lifecycle: entity formation, founders’ arrangements, equity incentive plans, SAFE and convertible note rounds, and priced equity financings from pre-seed through Series D.

Every one of our legal staff is Carta Certified and trained specifically to manage the routine corporate work startups run on: cap table maintenance, preparing consents, and facilitating signatures. Your equity gets managed more precisely and faster, at a fraction of the traditional cost, while your attorneys stay focused on the matters that actually require them.

No stage of a company gets more of our attention than this one. It is where we do our highest volume of work, which means the issues you are hitting for the first time are issues we have addressed hundreds of times.

We also stay close to where the market is moving. VW Partner Kevin Vela publishes a popular Substack on startups and venture, tracking the deal terms and financing trends founders are navigating in real time. We publish an annual Venture Deals Report analyzing our own transaction data to surface trends in early-stage Texas financings, and we track broader regional activity through VW Signals, our ongoing look at venture data from the middle of the country, a market too often left out of the national conversation. You can explore all of these resources, and more, below.