Today, they are also business partners.
McKelvey’s New York City early stage venture capital investing firm, Lerer Hippeau, led a $5.8 million seed round boosting Jones’ new startup, Lava Payments.
Lava makes possible payments for an array of AI tasks, without multiple steps of human involvement — and multiple subscriptions to AI services.
It was while trying to build what Jones thought would be a straightforward AI program that would populate a form, that he quickly found himself spending more than he wanted — more than $400.
“This just screamed, ‘Broken,’” he recalled of the process.
Jones brainstormed the idea for Lava — a digital wallet that opens doors to an array of AI services.
As Jones describes the notion, Lava is not an AI tool. It is a wallet that lets AI tools get paid without setting up separate accounts or subscriptions.
You pay as you go, Jones said. You put money into your wallet once and any AI service connected to Lava can use it, he said.
“We care about simplicity winning,” he said.
The moment is right, Jones and McKelvey believe. AI services are being adopted with dizzying speed.
But the service subscription model of $10 a month for this AI service, $15 a month for that AI service, can get dauntingly expensive fast. AI is here, but it’s not seamless, Jones said.
That’s where Lava comes in. You pay Lava for access. Lava builds relationships with merchants or vendors to open the digital door for those who need the services, but not a lot of different subscriptions.
For example, Jones works with a company called Simbie that gives physicians an AI “note taker” for patient calls. The program listens, writes up notes, and creates a to-do list for the doctor’s staff. The doctor’s office pays only for the notes it uses. Lava handles those payments automatically.
“We go to all the different services on the Internet, build relationships with them, so they can accept our, quote-unquote, ‘data plan or credit plan,’” Jones said. “When you pay us, you have free access to all of the AI services.”
Lava itself does not require a subscription. You can think of it as a master key. “But instead of locking you into a monthly fee, we only make money on the transactions you make,” Jones said.
Both merchants and customers will have real-time dashboards to monitor payments and balances.
“It’s an infrastructure play,” McKelvey said of the idea.
Jones’ solution is meant to operate in the background. Users need not be aware of it.
“AI revenue is projected to surge over the next three years,” Lerer Hippeau said in introducing Lava Payments to its portfolio. “This tremendous market opportunity is one that Lava has keyed in on.”
McKelvey is the son of former Dayton Daily News public affairs editor Vince McKelvey and local writer (and former Dayton Daily News assistant metro editor) Noreen Willhelm.
This partnership has been a long time coming, as McKelvey sees it. He was ten when he first met Jones, who was 11.
In an interview with the Dayton Daily News, the two had an easy camaraderie, anticipating each other’s thoughts and laughing about old times.
Both men graduated from CJ in 2012. McKelvey, 30, went to Ohio State before spending a few years working in Congress on economic policy and financial services. Jones went to Yale University, headed to San Francisco and interned for Goldman Sachs, worked for Facebook/Meta and Dropbox and started one company, financial services business Lendtable, all by the age of 31.
As his latest company gets bigger, “I’ll definitely get more sleep,” Jones quipped.
The two always stayed in touch, and McKelvey was aware of the progress Jones was making. When the time came for investor support, Jones already saw McKelvey as a natural ally.
“The reason I wanted his fund to lead the round is because his character is great,” Jones said.
“Mitchell is the smartest and most enterprising person that I know and has been since we met when we were 11 years old,” McKelvey said. “He’s incredibly intelligent.”
“I’ve been waiting for Mitchell to call me for a decade,” he added.
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