It is a Tuesday morning at a global law firm, and somebody in finance is staring at four browser tabs that refuse to agree with each other. The travel agency says one number. The corporate card says another. The expense tool says a third. The sustainability team wants the carbon figure by noon. Somewhere in that spreadsheet swamp is the truth about how the company travels, and nobody can reach it. This is the room Clarasight was built for.
Clarasight is a New York software company that sells one deceptively simple promise: a single, trustworthy view of your travel and expense data. It pulls from the travel management companies, the expense platforms, the card programs and the HR systems, and it stitches them into one AI-ready model. Then it goes to work - forecasting budgets, flagging overspend, arming negotiators with supplier data, enforcing policy, and reporting emissions. It does all of this without asking anyone to rip out the tools they already use, which is the polite way of saying it succeeds precisely where most enterprise software fails.
"Corporate travel hasn't been transformed by AI, and that gap is costing enterprises billions in inefficient spend, budget overruns, and hours of manual work every day."
The data was always there. Nobody could read it.
Business travel is one of the largest controllable costs an enterprise carries, and for years it has been managed with the analytical sophistication of a shoebox full of receipts. The information exists - airlines, hotels, agencies and cards all generate it. The trouble is that it lives in a dozen systems that were never designed to speak to one another, in formats that contradict each other, updated on schedules that never line up.
So the work falls to people. Analysts spend their weeks copying figures between systems, reconciling totals, and rebuilding the same report for the same meeting every month. By the time the numbers are clean, they are also old. Decisions get made on stale data or, more often, on a gut feeling dressed up as a dashboard. The sustainability team, asked for an emissions figure, frequently inherits the worst version of the same problem.
"The data was never missing. It was just scattered across enough systems that finding it cost more than the savings it revealed."
Two friends from Brown, and a detour through climate
Clarasight was founded in 2021 by Adam Braun and Philip Charm, longtime friends from Brown University and both serial operators. Braun is not an obvious enterprise-software protagonist. He previously founded Pencils of Promise, the nonprofit that has built close to 600 schools serving more than 200,000 students, and went on to co-found the edtech company MissionU, acquired by WeWork in 2018. His track record is in moving individual behavior at scale - a skill that turns out to matter more in corporate travel than the org chart suggests.
The company did not start out chasing travel budgets. It started as Climate Club, with a mission to help companies embed sustainability into the employee experience and cut carbon along with cost. The founders quickly hit a wall that anyone in carbon accounting will recognize: you cannot reduce emissions you cannot measure, and you cannot measure emissions when the underlying travel data is a fragmented mess. To solve the carbon problem honestly, they had to solve the data problem first.
"We are on a mission to reverse climate change by working with today's leading companies to embed sustainability into their employee experience."
In 2024 they renamed the company Clarasight and announced an advisory board of travel and sustainability veterans. The new name pointed at the broader value: not just a climate add-on, but clear sight of the whole picture - cost, supplier, policy and carbon at once. It was, in the founders' framing, less a pivot than the natural conclusion of what they had been building. The climate mission did not get deleted; it got a working foundation underneath it.
From a climate club to a $5 billion data layer, in five moves
Climate Club is founded
Adam Braun and Philip Charm launch in New York to help enterprises embed sustainability into how employees travel and spend.
$6.5M seed round
Backed by Climate Capital, Red Sea Ventures, Vestigo Ventures and MCJ Collective to expand the employee-focused sustainability product.
Rebrands to Clarasight
New name, new advisory board, and a wider remit: carbon planning plus the full travel-and-expense intelligence picture.
Revenue grows 10x
Enterprises adopt the platform across legal, pharma, software and manufacturing; spend under management climbs past $5 billion.
$11.5M Series A, led by AlleyCorp
Funds product development and go-to-market expansion across North America and Europe. Total raised reaches roughly $34M.
One model, then seven jobs done on top of it
Everything Clarasight does rests on one move: unifying fragmented data into a single, real-time model that is ready for AI to act on. Once that foundation exists, the rest stops being heroic and starts being routine.
Data Unification
Consolidates TMCs, expense platforms, card programs and HR systems into one real-time, AI-ready source of truth - on top of existing tools, not instead of them.
Automation & Workflows
Eliminates over 90% of manual data-review cycles, handing analysts their week back.
Forecasts & Budgets
Projects spend and flags budget overruns early, while there is still time to do something about them.
Supplier Management
Turns clean data into negotiating leverage with airlines, hotels and agencies.
Policy & Approvals
Automates travel-policy enforcement and approval routing so the rules apply themselves.
Sustainability Reporting
Tracks travel emissions with credible methodology - the capability the company was born to deliver.
"It does not replace your travel tools. It just makes them finally agree with each other."
Numbers that sound exaggerated until you've done it by hand
The skeptic's natural response to any AI platform is a raised eyebrow, and Clarasight's own statistics do nothing to lower it - a 99% reduction in reporting and insight-delivery time reads like a typo until you remember what the alternative is. The alternative is a person, a spreadsheet, and a lost Tuesday. Measured against that, the figures are less miraculous than overdue.
Clarasight, by the numbers
The customer list does the rest of the convincing. White & Case, DLA Piper and Clyde & Co bring the legal world; AstraZeneca brings pharma; HubSpot brings software; Scania brings heavy manufacturing; Milliman brings actuarial finance. These are organizations that travel constantly, spend enormously, and are audited closely - which is exactly the profile of a company that cannot afford to guess at its own numbers.
"Clarasight manages data from programs representing more than $5 billion in enterprise travel and expense spending."
Cost and carbon, finally on the same page
It would be easy to read the rebrand as a climate startup quietly abandoning its values for a bigger market. The more honest reading is the opposite. Clarasight discovered that cost savings and carbon savings are usually the same decision viewed from two angles - the unnecessary flight is both the line item and the emission. By building the data layer that makes cost legible, the company also made carbon legible, and it kept both in one platform on purpose.
The investor syndicate reflects that double identity. The $11.5M Series A was led by AlleyCorp, with Rackhouse Venture Capital, Clocktower Ventures, Pulse Fund, Thayer Ventures, Future Back Ventures, Vestigo Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital joining - a mix of fintech, travel and climate-leaning backers who all see the same thing in different colors.
The intelligence layer, not another booking tool
The bet underneath Clarasight is that the future of corporate travel is not a slicker app for booking flights. It is the intelligence layer underneath all of them - the thing that knows what was spent, what it cost the planet, what the supplier should have charged, and what next quarter will look like. As AI moves from novelty to infrastructure inside the enterprise, the companies that own the clean, unified data are the ones that get to act on it. Clarasight is trying to be that owner for an entire category.
Things worth knowing
- Clarasight began life as "Climate Club" - the old @climateclub_ and /climateclubhq social handles still linger like a forwarding address.
- CEO Adam Braun built nearly 600 schools through Pencils of Promise before he built software for travel managers.
- His earlier startup, MissionU, was acquired by WeWork in 2018 - a different era of enterprise ambition.
- The two co-founders met as friends at Brown University long before they were co-founders.
- The pitch never asks you to throw anything away. It just makes your existing tools stop contradicting each other.
Back to that Tuesday morning. The four browser tabs are still open somewhere in the world - but at the firms running Clarasight, nobody is squinting between them anymore. The numbers reconcile themselves overnight. The carbon figure is ready before noon, and it is the same figure the CFO is looking at. The lost Tuesday is no longer lost. That is the whole product, and for a category that ran on shoeboxes for decades, it is more than enough.