Founder profile

Nick Vlku

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Backplanes

Led Phone Numbers engineering and growth at Twilio and product growth at Algolia, and sold his first company to Live Nation. Now building the system that shows companies what their AI agents actually did.

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Nick Vlku, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Backplanes

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Biography

The work behind the title

Nick Vlku is co-founder and CTO of Backplanes, which gives security teams visibility and control over what their AI agents do. He leads engineering and go-to-market, and founded the company with Seth Blank and Neil Kumaran. Spotlight, the product Backplanes launched first, reads Claude Code and Codex sessions and shows what the agent actually did. It was third product of the day on Product Hunt.

At Twilio he went, in his own words, from principal engineer of data to head of growth engineering before becoming Director of Engineering for phone numbers. When phone number regulation threatened one of Twilio’s businesses in Europe, he led the work that made compliance a system rather than a scramble. That work is now three granted US patents on allocating phone numbers in line with each jurisdiction’s rules.

At Algolia, the search API company, he was Vice President of Product Growth. He rebuilt the pricing so that the free tier grew from 10,000 to a million records, launched Algolia’s MCP server so agents could build and tune search indexes, and gave the opening keynote at DevCon 2025.

He and Seth Blank have built together since high school. Their social search startup YourTrove was acquired by Live Nation Labs in 2014. Before that he built systems at Ticketmaster and was a Vice President of Technology at Goldman Sachs.

In his own words

On the record

Most agent platforms stop at the demo. Agent Studio starts from a different assumption: agents aren’t just another search box. By grounding retrieval and memory in Algolia’s infrastructure, we make agents accurate, adaptive, and trustworthy in production, where it matters most.

Algolia, via Yahoo Finance, Dec 2025

  • This is more than better search, it’s the foundation of understanding. We’re giving developers the ability to build assistants that don’t just retrieve information, they reason, clarify, and help users move forward.

    Algolia, Dec 2025

  • Agentic AI demands developer control, open standards, and trustworthy infrastructure. We are giving developers the power to create AI systems that don’t just respond, but collaborate.

    Algolia, Dec 2025

Speaking topics

What Nick can speak to

  1. 01

    What your agents actually did

    Building the system that reads Claude Code and Codex sessions and shows what happened. What agents do when nobody is looking, from the CTO who built the thing that looks.

  2. 02

    MCP in production: what changes when the developer is an agent

    He launched Algolia’s MCP server and built the demos. What an API has to become when its user is a model, and what breaks first.

  3. 03

    Compliance as infrastructure

    Three patents came from making phone numbers legal across jurisdictions at Twilio. How to turn a regulatory scramble into a system that re-verifies itself.

  4. 04

    Pricing is a product decision

    The dark art and science of pricing developer products, from taking Algolia’s free tier to a million records. Live workshop or talk.

  5. 05

    How infrastructure earns developer trust

    Lessons from Twilio’s early growth and Algolia’s developer platform on the details that make engineers trust an API with production.

  6. 06

    Two companies, one co-founder

    What stays the same from YourTrove to Backplanes when you build with the same person for twenty years, and what has to change.

The record

Press, bylines, talks, and citations

Patents

Podcasts

Talks

Press and interviews

Bylines

Press kit

For producers and editors

Name
Nick Vlku
Title
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Backplanes
Company
Backplanes
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/nickvlku
Bookings
hello@backplanes.com

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Also at Backplanes

The other founders

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