Clado has raised US$2 million for its artificial intelligence platform for mass recruitment.
Five of TreasureThe team members went to high school 20 minutes away from each other in Toronto. But getting the gang back together required launching Y Combinator and purchasing all the shares for US$3 million ($425 million CAD).
“There's a very human aspect to recruiting. But we want to automate all the tedious work.”
Eric Mao,
Treasure
Clado, who graduated from the prestigious accelerator this spring, created a people-finding algorithm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through data and gather insights. The company says it employs more than 100,000 AI agents to “help recruiting and sales teams find everyone and everything about them.” The company just received a US$2 million ($2.8 million CAD) seed round in simple future equity (SAFE) agreements from Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners and a dozen angel checks, including from Salesforce president and chief strategy officer David Schmeier.
The team building this is almost entirely a Toronto team that has been building similar products in parallel for years. Co-founders Eric Mao and Tom Zheng went to the US for college, created Clado as a side project to connect alumni networks, and entered it into Y Combinator's selective accelerator program. Jefferson Dean and Rohin Arya stayed in Canada and founded Jaimy, joining Ripple Ventures. HangerLeKS scholarship program.
When Arya and Dean visited San Francisco, they needed last-minute accommodations and stayed with Clado's crew. Then they started talking and realized that a combined approach to software discovery could be effective.
“Clado is like people who search for everyone in the world, whereas we created people who search for people you already know,” Arya said in an interview with BetaKit.
The company officially launched its operations in May and claims to have achieved 60 percent month-on-month growth since then. Its main clients include artificial intelligence (AI) hiring companies and Turing data labeling companies, which have database of more than 2 million engineers worldwide, as well as Mercor, which has tens of thousands of contractors.
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Prior to Jamie's acquisition, Clado was one of many startups with Canadian-born founders that were targeting Silicon Valley and its venture capital (VC). A survey Toronto venture capital firm Leaders Fund found that only 32.4 per cent of “high-potential” Canadian-led startups launched in 2024 were headquartered in Canada, while nearly half were headquartered in the United States. This is a sharp decline from what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Mao told BetaKit that Clado did not speak with the Canadian venture capitalist because the number of investor inquiries coming from the world-famous Y Combinator program was so high.
“After YC, fundraising is structured so that you don’t actually make any outbound calls,” Mao said, adding that the team fielded about 60 calls from investors.
Currently, part of Clado's team works in San Francisco, and the rest in Toronto.
While the company is using AI to recruit customers at scale, Mao said the team views Clado as a tool, not a replacement.
“I don’t think AI can handle your entire recruiting workflow,” Mao said. “There's a very human aspect to recruiting. But we want to automate all the tedious work.”
Image courtesy of Clado.
