This week, Velora welcomed its very first Private Beta users. That milestone felt like the right moment to pause, look back on how this all began, and say thank you to the community that has helped shape it from the start.
I'm the primary developer behind Velora — usually heads-down in code every single day, which means I don't surface publicly very often. But I want anyone following our journey to know: we read everything. Every piece of feedback, every comment, every message. My brother Jonathan is the voice most of our community hears from regularly, and every week the two of us sit down together to go through it all — capturing every insight, every frustration, every encouraging word. It all shapes what we build.
Velora began as an idea in November of 2024, sitting in church one Sunday, fumbling to open the passage my pastor asked us to turn to before he finished reading it. I know where all the books of the Bible are, but it still takes a moment — and I've always struggled to take notes and truly listen at the same time. For me, it feels like a trade-off:
I'm either fully listening and understanding but forgetting by the end of the week, or I'm taking notes to remember later but not really absorbing it in the moment.
Either way, I always dreaded that question when I'd meet up with Christian friends or family later:
"How was church? What was the sermon about?"
That frustration is what sparked the idea for what we now call Relay, even before I had the full vision for Velora. I started building the technology for Relay in December, and by April of 2025 — with a working prototype in hand — I left my full-time job and dove in completely alongside my brother Jonathan.
Jonathan is the secret sauce behind Velora. He's not only an avid theologian and a skilled children's book author (his book P.R.A.Y. Pals is shipping very soon — check it out!), but also a gifted artist and designer. He's the reason Velora looks the way it does.
Together, we decided early on that craftsmanship had to be central to everything we built. We believe craftsmanship is one of the most distinctly human attributes still capable of standing out in a marketplace increasingly flooded with AI-generated solutions. But more than that — craftsmanship glorifies God. He crafted the entire universe with precision and perfection, and He saw that it was good.
As a result, Velora has taken more time to build than it otherwise would have. I've probably spent as much time ensuring Velora is pixel-perfect with Jonathan's mockups as I have building the technology that powers it. Jonathan reminds me of this regularly when he asks me to fix something 2 pixels off from his design.
Nothing is perfect outside of God Himself — but the sentiment stands: we want Velora to be worthy of the Word it serves, even knowing it will fall short and that bugs will surface along the way.
The road has been challenging. Some things turned out to be easier than I expected; many others were far harder. That's because we're genuinely building something that doesn't quite exist yet. There are other apps that transcribe and take notes, but Relay is the first of its kind capable of identifying Scripture references in real-time.
It's still not where I want it to be. I'm currently building what we've begun calling Relay V2, or "Relay Hardening" as it appears on our roadmap. The initial architecture had some fundamental limitations that required a new approach. Some of the current quirks include:
Hearing "as you see in verse 5" and incorrectly attributing it to the wrong book or chapter if the speaker didn't reference it directly in the same breath
Hearing "number one in the outline" and thinking the speaker is referring to Numbers chapter 1
Direct-quote matching carrying more latency than I'd like — sometimes recognizing a quoted verse a few beats late, occasionally going backward or skipping one entirely
Despite all of this, the groundwork is laid and I'm genuinely excited to launch Relay V2 to you soon.
Some of you may remember that we originally aimed to launch our Private Beta at the start of last winter, just in time for Advent. That slipped to spring — just in time for Easter. Better late than never.
I'm excited to finally begin seeing the original vision come to life. There will still be rough edges, and there is certainly much more left to build. But I am so grateful for the community that has formed around Velora while we've been building it. You've helped shape this product in real ways — sometimes directly influencing our original plans and roadmap.
I am truly humbled. I couldn't have gotten this far without God's grace, and regardless of what comes next, I know I owe it all to Him.
— Colin, Co-Founder of Velora