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$7M SEED co-led by Barclays & Citi PRIVATE CREDIT deal intelligence, automated $3T+ in lending still runs on manual work NEW YORK // 1178 Broadway SOAL LABS partnership ships off-the-shelf AI stack AGENTIC AI that shows its sources $7M SEED co-led by Barclays & Citi PRIVATE CREDIT deal intelligence, automated $3T+ in lending still runs on manual work NEW YORK // 1178 Broadway SOAL LABS partnership ships off-the-shelf AI stack AGENTIC AI that shows its sources
Company Profile Fintech · AI Seed Stage

Claira reads the deal so you can judge it.

An agentic AI teammate for private markets - built by people who actually did the deals.

Founded2024
HQNew York
Team~23
Seed$7M
Claira logo

The wordmark of a company betting that finance's most manual corner is ready for software. Claira, New York.

The Pitch

A trillion-dollar market that still runs on copy-paste

Here is a fact that sounds made up but isn't: more than $3 trillion in investment and lending decisions still depend on manual effort and legacy systems. Somewhere right now, an analyst at a private credit fund is highlighting a PDF at 11pm, copying a covenant into a spreadsheet, and hoping the number in the memo matches the number in the term sheet. This is the beating heart of modern finance, and it runs on attention, caffeine, and copy-paste.

Claira, a New York startup, thinks this is absurd - and, more usefully, thinks it is a business. The company builds what it calls agentic AI for private markets: software that captures, organizes, and analyzes the institutional knowledge and investment activity that deal teams generate but rarely reuse. In plain terms, it reads the documents, structures the data, and hands the human something they can actually defend in front of an investment committee.

The important word there is "defend." Plenty of companies will sell you an AI that answers questions about a data room. The problem with a confident answer in finance is that someone will eventually ask you where it came from, and "the model said so" is not an acceptable reply when there is real money and a compliance officer involved. Claira's pitch is that every answer comes with transparent reasoning and cited sources. The citation is not a nice-to-have. In this business, the citation is the product.

The other thing Claira is trying not to do is the thing enterprise software usually does, which is demand that you throw out everything you already own. The platform is built to plug into the systems teams already use - CRMs, internal file drives, portfolio management systems, market intelligence feeds - through two-way integrations. The best enterprise AI, the theory goes, is the kind nobody has to be retrained to use. It disappears into the workflow instead of standing next to it demanding attention.

"Firms are sitting on a trove of proprietary research which they are not leveraging."

Eric Chang, Co-Founder & CEO
$7MSeed round, June 2025
$3T+Decisions still manual
~23People on the team
3Co-founders
The Product

What you can actually do with it

01 / Capture

Automated deal capture

Claira captures, categorizes, and extracts data from complex deal documents automatically, turning a folder of PDFs into structured, searchable deal data.

02 / Analyze

AI-powered deal analysis

The platform surfaces insights and flags discrepancies with transparent reasoning and cited sources - so an analyst can trace every answer back to the document it came from.

03 / Remember

Institutional memory

It captures and applies a firm's own investment knowledge, so proprietary research from past deals becomes a compounding asset instead of a buried archive.

04 / Integrate

Fits your stack

Two-way API integrations connect Claira to CRMs, file drives, portfolio management systems, and market intelligence providers - no rip-and-replace required.

Offered in tiers - Claira Core (individuals), Advanced (teams), and Enterprise (organizations).

The Team

Practitioners, not tourists

EC

Eric Chang, CFA

Co-Founder & CEO
AS

Alex Schumacher

Co-Founder & Head of Data Science
FP

Federico Polacov

Co-Founder & CTO

A small team blending finance domain expertise with data science and engineering - the people who got tired of the manual grind and decided to code their way out.

The Money

When two banks write your first check

In June 2025, Claira closed a $7 million seed round. The notable part is not the number - it is who signed it. The round was co-led by Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures, with participation from Activant Capital, KDX, OPCO Ventures, and Glezbeck Ventures. Two of the world's largest banks becoming your seed co-leads is not a "cool startup" signal. It reads more like "we have this problem, and we cannot build our way out of it fast enough."

The plan for the money is unglamorous and correct: expand engineering and go-to-market, deepen partnerships with financial institutions, and push the AI further into capital markets workflows.

Seed (2025)
$7.0M
Total raised
$7.23M

Figures per public reporting. Total funding includes prior pre-seed activity.

Who's on the cap table

Barclays · lead Citi · lead Reimagine Tech Ventures · lead Activant Capital KDX OPCO Ventures Glezbeck Ventures
On The Record

What they're saying

"Firms are sitting on a trove of proprietary research which they are not leveraging."

Eric Chang, Claira

"We're excited to back Eric and his team as they apply technology to an area of the market which has traditionally seen an over-reliance on manual process and workflow."

Kester Keating, Barclays

"Claira fits into existing systems and enables more granular, efficient deal analysis."

Neil Agarwal, OPCO Ventures
Latest Updates

The story so far

2024

Claira launches in New York, building agentic AI for private markets deal workflows.

JUNE 2025

Closes a $7M seed round co-led by Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures to grow the team and advance its AI for capital markets.

OCTOBER 2025

Partners with Soal Labs to ship an off-the-shelf, fully integrated AI deal intelligence platform for private credit - spanning origination, underwriting, investment committee, and post-close.

Notes In The Margin

Four things worth knowing

Watch & Read

Go deeper

Product demo and interview videos are published on Claira's own channels - links above point to their newsroom and a YouTube search.

The Rolodex

Find Claira

Quick facts: Claira

Claira is a New York-based startup building an agentic AI platform for private markets. It embeds domain-native AI directly into deal workflows for private credit funds and financial institutions, automating document extraction, due diligence, deal capture, and analysis so investment teams can surface insights and put their own proprietary research to work. In June 2025 it raised a $7M seed round co-led by Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures.

Founded
2024
Headquarters
New York, New York, United States
Founders
Eric Chang (Co-Founder & CEO), Alex Schumacher (Co-Founder & Head of Data Science), Federico Polacov (Co-Founder & CTO)
Team size
~23 employees
Products
Claira Deal Intelligence Platform, AI-Powered Deal Analysis, Integrations, Claira Core / Advanced / Enterprise
Notable
Raised a $7M seed round co-led by Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures in June 2025, Secured strategic backing from two global banks as first institutional investors, Launched an off-the-shelf AI deal intelligence platform for private credit via a partnership with Soal Labs (October 2025)

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