The founder who automated the work nobody wanted
At Amazon, the job was to sit between a brilliant idea and the moment it shipped, and to ask the unglamorous questions. Where does this data go? Who can see it? What happens if it leaks? Emily Choi-Greene asked those questions for five years on the team guarding Alexa, the voice that lives in millions of kitchens. The reviews were thorough. They were also slow, manual, and the kind of work that engineers route around when they can.
She is the co-founder and CEO of Clearly AI, a Seattle company in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch that does in minutes what once took weeks: threat models, privacy impact assessments, vendor risk evaluations. The whole soggy stack of security paperwork that stands between a feature and a launch. She built it because she had lived inside the problem long enough to lose patience with it.
The origin is unusually literal. In 2019, Emily met Joe Choi-Greene while the two of them were working on an Alexa security review. They are now married. He is Clearly AI's CTO. The company and the marriage share a single founding document, and it was a security review. Most couples have a song. They have a threat model.
It's wild to go from an engineering job to being in the same room as some of the greatest founders.Emily Choi-Greene, on the YC batch retreat
Five years of asking the hard questions
Before Clearly AI, Emily owned data security and privacy at Moveworks, the enterprise AI company, where the work ran into privacy-preserving machine learning, sensitive-data detection, and data masking. Before that came Amazon, where she led Alexa AI Security and reviewed an ML compute platform used by more than 5,000 machine-learning scientists. The number matters less than the texture of it: thousands of engineers, each with an idea, each needing a sign-off, and a security team perpetually outnumbered.
She performed hundreds of these reviews herself. That is the detail that explains everything else. People who have done a thing hundreds of times by hand tend to develop strong opinions about whether a machine could do it better. Emily's answer was yes, and she was willing to bet a company on it.
Her academic roots are at Dartmouth College, where she graduated with High Honors in Computer Science. Her work on privacy-preserving machine learning has been featured in the New York Times, and she has taken the stage at USENIX PEPR, the privacy engineering conference where practitioners argue about exactly the kind of problems Clearly AI now automates.
Sales & marketing are HARD.Emily Choi-Greene, halfway through Y Combinator
From engineer to founder, out loud
Plenty of technical founders treat the messy middle of company-building as a secret. Emily does the opposite. On her personal blog she has published her complete, unedited Y Combinator application, along with guides on interview prep, notes on losing a business deal, and honest writing about holding a company together through a personal crisis. It is the work of someone who would rather be useful than impressive.
She describes the YC experience in plain, slightly delighted terms. The three-day Sonoma retreat, she wrote, felt like college orientation meets summer camp. The founder-led sales bootcamp was a compressed business school. An engineer by training, she found herself learning to sell, and gained a convert's respect for the people who do it well. There is no posturing in any of it. Just a builder narrating the climb in real time.
What Clearly AI actually does
The pitch is refreshingly concrete. Security teams are understaffed and buried under software, vendors, and policies they are supposed to review. Clearly AI uses AI to turn that backlog into something that moves: high-quality assessments completed in minutes instead of weeks, mapped to regulatory frameworks, plugged into the tools engineers already live in. The company has raised roughly $8.4M and grown to a team of more than a dozen, with Fortune 500s and global brands among its early users.
It is a tidy loop. Emily spent years being the bottleneck she most resented, the careful person standing between a good idea and its release. Clearly AI is her attempt to remove that bottleneck without removing the care. The reviews still happen. They just stop taking three weeks and a war of attrition.
She and Joe worked extended hours preparing for the batch's Product Day, and she has been visibly eager to show the world what the team has shipped. For a company built to make slow things fast, the founders move at the appropriate speed.
It's wild to go from an engineering job to being in the same room as some of the greatest founders.On the YC batch
Sales & marketing are HARD.Halfway through YC
We can't wait to show the world all of the new Clearly AI features.On Product Day
Worth knowing
Her company and her marriage both trace back to one Alexa security review in 2019.
She runs Clearly AI as a husband-and-wife team. She is CEO; Joe is CTO.
Co-founder Joe once led the satellite telemetry team at Amazon's Project Kuiper.
She published her entire YC application online, unedited, for anyone to copy.
Her privacy-preserving ML work has been featured in the New York Times.