A team of serial entrepreneurs backed by one of the region’s wealthiest investors has launched Velo, a new messaging service targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

Velo Industries Inc. is a Bedford- and Toronto-based company that until recently was called Eyeball and had developed an online network for amateur sports. The company raised $1.1 million in late 2015, led by CFFI Ventures, whose principal investor is Clearwater Fine Foods founder John Risley.

They have now pivoted, changed the name, and brought in a new CEO to provide a messaging service for SMEs.

The new CEO is Keith Bates, a Toronto-based business development specialist who worked with Eyeball founders Jay Steele and Shaun Johansen in their previous ventures. Last summer, the trio hooked up and began brainstorming on how the business might evolve to target a better market.

“We played with different ideas and messaging came up again and again,” Bates said in an interview last week. “Eventually, over the summer, it dawned on us that there’s no difference between a sports team and — ministry of the obvious — any group of people who have to stay in touch. . . . Eventually we said, ‘Let’s make a 21st century messaging system.’”

Velo operates on the principle that people don’t like emails because they’re cumbersome and inefficient. Going through a stream to find what people said is a bother, as is constantly adding names to groups.

“We’ve seen lots of instances in the political or business sphere of email’s senility showing through,” said Bates.

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What Velo has done is create a messaging service in which a small business can communicate easily with its team, clients or other stakeholders. It allows a simple addition of names and lets the users determine their groups. Lawyers, designers, contractors or mentors can all slot into their own groups, and users can create Velo groups for special projects.

The service, which is now available on iOS, Android and Google Chrome, includes several “applets” that offer the users business features like event scheduling, checklists, rich text memos and countdowns.

The team has added document upload and download functions. Bates said the countdown function is especially useful as it reminds everyone involved in a project how long they have to complete it.

Bates said the company has now released Velo with friends and family members, and is testing it with a few small businesses. So far the feedback has been positive, he said, and the company’s investors have supported the team throughout the pivot.

The team certainly is experienced. Steele and Johansen have previously launched and sold two startups. During the original dot-com boom in the mid- to late-1990s, they teamed up to launch Plazmic, an early mobile venture that they ended up selling to Research in Motion. A few years later, they started another mobile startup called Viigo. And again they sold it to RIM.

Now they are pushing the product out and hoping to raise more money — Bates said the target will likely be “a few million bucks.” He foresees fast growth.

“The nature of our business is that we can scale very rapidly,” said Bates. “It can grow organically. We’ve had tremendous interest, and we have had a good experience with investors.”