TLDR
- ZenBusiness says its new AI agent, Velo, has reduced customer compliance questions by 20% and driven higher demand for DBA and trademark filings.
- Velo uses customer data and a network of more than 30 AI sub-agents to guide entrepreneurs through formation, compliance and operational tasks — and complete many of them automatically.
- The company is expanding Velo beyond filings into banking, invoicing and accounting as it positions AI as a way to level the playing field for small businesses.
ZenBusiness is betting that the next wave of small-business formation will run through an AI agent that not only answers questions but completes legal, compliance and operational tasks on behalf of entrepreneurs.
Enter Velo, the AI agent recently launched by ZenBusiness, a company that helps entrepreneurs form and manage small businesses. Tech billionaire Mark Cuban serves as its spokesperson.
“It’s a do-it-for-you AI agent,” said CEO Ross Buhrdorf, in an interview with The AI Innovator. He said Velo has reduced customer compliance questions by 20% since launch and is driving higher demand for DBA and trademark filings.
Buhrdorf said small businesses stand to gain more from AI than perhaps any other segment because founders often lack access to attorneys or accountants and are forced to navigate unfamiliar legal and financial requirements by themselves.
“Small business owners, solopreneurs, they’re on their own,” he said.
Velo draws on ZenBusiness’ data from 850,000 customers, including business type, location and filing history. The agent not only answers questions but generates actions, such as creating a customized marketing plan or a website.
Buhrdorf said customers also feel more comfortable asking detailed questions of an AI agent than a human representative, reducing hesitation around “Is this a dumb question or not?” and driving higher engagement.
Routing to 30+ sub-agents
While Velo’s interface appears unified, the system is built on a routing architecture that directs queries to more than 30 domain-specific sub-agents, Buhrdorf said. The sub-agents specialize in categories of queries, such as about compliance or business structure. “It gives advice, and we also curate that advice based on all of our experience as the experts in this space – and that feeds back into the (AI) engine.”
The company uses a mix of large language models, primarily Google’s Gemini but with the flexibility to switch to Anthropic’s Claude when its answers perform better. ZenBusiness uses Google Cloud. “Google helped us build all of this, so we’re primarily based on Gemini,” he said.
A back-office dashboard monitors every user prompt in real time, using AI to cluster and summarize questions and human reviewers to correct inaccurate outputs. Any fixes are fed back into the system to improve future responses. “We’re also constantly monitoring the answers to make sure they’re not whacked out or off the rails,” Buhrdorf said.
The system’s guidance is already influencing customer behavior. Since launch, DBA filings are up 33% and trademark filings are up 30%, a pattern Buhrdorf attributes to users asking whether they need those registrations and then opting in when Velo offers to complete the filings.
A recent Wharton study shows that smaller companies are adopting AI faster than large enterprises as they realize that it helps them better compete against rivals with big staff.
Automating invoicing and accounting
Buhrdorf described Velo as a full-spectrum advisor that can guide users through major decisions like choosing an LLC, S-corp or C-corp structure, determining the best state to form in, or deciding whether a DBA is necessary.
Velo can also generate and publish business websites using a customer’s name, jurisdiction and business purpose. Upcoming capabilities will include invoicing, banking integrations and general-ledger accounting, with the ability to file taxes further down the roadmap.
“We’ve got a banking product, and we have a tax and accounting product,” the CEO said. “The next phase of Velo is it will actually do the invoicing and then fill out the general ledger for your accounting and taxes – all the stuff that people hate to do.”
Buhrdorf did acknowledge the risk of model hallucinations, especially with high-stakes financial outputs. “We’re not claiming that the answers that Anthropic or Gemini come back with don’t hallucinate. They absolutely do,” he said. ZenBusiness mitigates this through continual human-in-the-loop oversight and a hybrid model in which AI generates recommendations but key tax filings still flow through partners.
Buhrdorf said ZenBusiness already uses robotic process automation for more than half of its state filings and backs all filings with an accuracy guarantee. The same will be true of Velo. “We have a 100% guarantee for our customers that your filing will be done right,” he said.
Buhrdorf said the company sees AI as a structural advantage for entrepreneurs who lack the back-office infrastructure of larger companies. “We’re here to level the playing field,” he said. “If we can make small business more successful, then we’re more successful.”
He framed Velo as a way for harried founders to avoid administrative burdens. “That’s what our customers tell us – ‘we have no time. Yes, we want you to do it for us,’” the CEO said. “That’s exactly right.”
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