Community Highlights: Meet Keylem Collier of Versaunt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Keylem Collier.

Hi Keylem, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Since childhood, I’ve always been drawn to entrepreneurship, even if I didn’t know exactly what that would look like. Growing up as a military brat, I moved around a lot and got to see a wide range of places and cultures from a young age. Looking back, that global perspective has had a real influence on how I think and operate today.

When I graduated high school, I went straight into business school, genuinely thinking I’d learn how to run a business. I quickly realized that studying business in college had very little to do with entrepreneurship and almost everything to do with becoming an employee. I was disappointed, but I kept going, and in my off hours I was always working on something: e-commerce, dropshipping, apparel, consumer electronics, audio engineering. The audio engineering work was where my entrepreneurial side really kicked in. I was getting clients, running a service business, and combining it with a genuine love for music and creativity.

That eventually led me to start an AI music company, where users could find producers, songwriters, engineers, and studios through a simple prompt. Instead of getting back text, you’d get back contact information for real people in the music industry. That idea caught the attention of a program called TILE running through the Atlanta mayor’s office and Georgia Tech. Getting into that program was exactly the excuse I needed to drop out of school and go all in.

I ran that startup for about two years. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I made some of my closest friends, learned what it means to manage people, ship product, build a go-to-market strategy, hire, and fire. But it was also my first real tech startup, and I still had a lot to learn. We didn’t hit the growth targets we needed to, and eventually I shut it down.

I spent the summer of 2025 reflecting on every business I’d ever worked on. The pattern I kept seeing was that the product was never my biggest challenge. The hard part was always execution, distribution, and getting sales. That’s when I landed on paid media. It’s the most scalable channel on the planet, and also one of the most complex, time-consuming, and experience-demanding. By that point I’d been running ads for about six years across my own businesses and as a small consultancy, so I knew the space well.

I started asking myself whether AI agents had gotten good enough to handle those job functions autonomously. Creating ads, managing them, optimizing them, having good judgment on landing pages and copy. Most of that work already happens entirely on a computer. I wanted to know if an agent could take all of it off a business owner’s plate in under a minute of setup, letting them focus on strategy and operations instead.

That question led to Versaunt. I started building it in late July 2025 and launched a beta with early users shortly after. There wasn’t much of a product yet, but the feedback was invaluable. I had no co-founder at the time, but I knew I needed one. A friend suggested posting on Reddit. I did, and over 60 people from around the world reached out: people from Harvard, Apple, Meta, Google. It was exciting, but most of them were in their 40s and 50s and weren’t looking for the kind of scrappy, all-in dynamic a early-stage startup demands. I also knew a local co-founder would be worth ten times more than someone remote.

Out of all those responses, only one person was in Atlanta, and they happened to be on the Georgia Tech campus. That was Greg Steckle. We met up, clicked immediately, and did a 30-day trial to see if we could actually work well together. We could. We launched our MVP the same week he joined and just kept building, kept shipping, kept growing.

This spring, that momentum caught the attention of a venture firm called Antler VC. They invited us to come work out of their office in San Francisco for a few weeks. We’re now at a point where we’re getting more business than we can handle, and we’re actively preparing for a fundraise. Looking back, I think the through line across all of it is just a stubborn, curious mindset from a young age. I always wanted to build something. That determination is a big part of why I’m here today.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Definitely not. I’ve been at the lowest of lows and the highest of highs on this journey. There were months where I’d work 12 hours a day, sunrise to sunset, 13 days straight, take a short break, and then do it all over again.
Some of the hardest parts were just not knowing what to build, and not fully understanding the consequences of the decisions I was making, whether that was leaving school, quitting a job, or burning through savings just to keep going. There were stretches where I was sleeping in cars or on friends’ couches, just trying to make something work.
I’m grateful for all of it, but it was not easy. For a long time I genuinely believed that if I just worked 80 hours a week, success was guaranteed. Looking back, I’ve learned there’s a big difference between working hard and working effectively. A lot of the time, the most effective thing you can do as an entrepreneur is actually work fewer hours and be intentional about balancing the business with your personal life.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My business is called Versaunt. We’re an AI startup building fully autonomous marketing agents that create, manage, and optimize ads for small business owners who don’t have the time, experience, or budget to hire a top-quality marketing agency.
We were founded and built out of Georgia Tech in the fall of 2024. The vision we’re building toward is a world where people aren’t paying for software to learn yet another tool, but instead paying for AI agents to deliver a specific business outcome without them needing to be involved at all.
Something I’m genuinely proud of on the brand side is our commitment to transparency. We’re always upfront with customers about where the product is, what it does, and what it doesn’t do yet. That honesty has meant a lot to the people we work with.
If you’re running a small business doing at least $200,000 a year and you’re trying to scale to $300,000, $400,000, or beyond, Versaunt might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
I think there’s hundreds of variables that go into why certain people are successful and others aren’t. I think the simplest thing that every successful person has in common is they just didn’t give up. They may have pivoted, they may have fallen, they may have even taken a break at certain times, but they never gave up. They just kept going, whether it took a year, two years, a decade, etc.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.versaunt.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keylemcollier/