Kelo Ventures LLC

We build companies
with AI at the foundation.

Kelo Ventures starts, backs, and scales AI-native businesses. Not software with a model bolted on. Companies where intelligence is the core, and everything else is built around it.

See the venturesMeet the founder

The ventures

One pattern, three companies.

Each venture puts AI at the core of an unglamorous, high-stakes problem: food-safety compliance, public-sector contracting, workforce accountability. Different markets, same conviction.

Calm compliance for food safety teams.

TraceGuard AI turns spreadsheet chaos into audit-ready traceability. It runs four-phase mock recalls with a live phase tracker, SLA timer, and evidence log, built on canonical product and ingredient registries, one-click recursive traceability mapping in both directions, and export packages with digital sign-offs.

Single-site SMB food manufacturers and QA teams that treat recall readiness as a recurring discipline.

Visit TraceGuard AI ↗

Opportunity intelligence for California government contracts.

BidFlare matches public-sector opportunities across 483 municipalities, 58 counties, 1,100+ school districts, and 3,400+ special districts to a small business's profile. It flags which contracts are worth pursuing and clarifies what each one requires before the business invests in a response.

Marketing agencies, contracting trades (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, janitorial, construction, facilities, landscaping, field services), and digital services firms.

Visit BidFlare ↗

The founder

AI belongs in the foundation, not the feature list.

Portrait of Miguel de la Lama, founder of Kelo Ventures

Miguel de la Lama founded Kelo Ventures on one conviction: the companies that matter in this era will be built around intelligence, not decorated with it. Kelo Ventures is the platform he uses to start, back, and scale businesses built on that principle.

He is a builder and operator who turns emerging AI capability into companies that solve unglamorous, high-stakes problems: food-safety compliance, public-sector contracting, workforce accountability. The ventures are evidence of one repeatable pattern. Put intelligence at the core, then build the business around it.

He has embedded AI at the core of products at every scale, from a telecom giant to early-stage startups: personalization at AT&T, translation infrastructure at Fluently, and voice AI at Clockero. Trained across UT Austin (McCombs), Kellogg, MIT Sloan, UCLA, and UTEP.

The full story lives at migueldelalama.com →

Or find him on LinkedIn →

Building something in this direction?

Kelo Ventures is always interested in hard, unglamorous problems where intelligence at the core changes the economics. If that sounds like your world, get in touch.

hello@keloventures.com