/ How Vantage AI started
Vantage AI started in 2026 with a simple observation: AI agents had become good enough to do real back office work, but almost everything being sold to small businesses was a customer facing gimmick.
Joel and Jon came at it from opposite ends. Jon had been building agent systems and running real operations through them: agents that keep books, run schedules, produce marketing and report upward like a team. Joel kept hearing the same thing from business owners: the problem was never answering the phone, it was the nights and weekends lost to invoicing, chasing payments, quoting and paperwork.
So we put the two together. We built the agent team first, ran our own company through it, and shaped it into a product a trade business owner could run over WhatsApp without learning any new software. That product is The Back Office.
We are early stage and honest about it. No inflated numbers, no invented client logos. We would rather earn trust slowly by being straight about where we are: a small Sydney team building something we think is genuinely new, and proving it one business at a time.