Nobody on Wall Street knows the average liquidation preference in private credit. Trillions of dollars move through these markets every year, and one of the most basic facts about how a deal is actually structured lives nowhere except inside thousands of unread PDFs. Eric Chang found that absurd. So he built a company to fix it.
Claira, the firm he co-founded and runs as CEO, does something deceptively dull: it reads documents. Credit agreements, indentures, CLO term sheets, the dense legal prose that analysts skim at 11pm and pray they didn't miss a covenant. Claira's software ingests them in minutes, converts each sentence into a logic map, then traces every relationship across the whole document. The boring part is the point. The terms buried in those files are the raw material of every investment decision - and until now, nobody had a clean way to query them at scale.
The contrarian bet inside the AI boom
Most of the AI industry in 2025 is busy handing every knowledge worker a personal copilot. Chang thinks that is quietly making firms dumber. His argument is sharp and a little heretical: when each analyst gets a faster assistant, the firm's knowledge fragments into a thousand private chat windows that vanish the moment someone changes jobs.
The future isn't an AI assistant for every person - it's an agentic platform for the entire deal team.Eric Chang, on why he rejects the copilot model
The thesis behind Claira is that the real bottleneck in finance was never the speed of a single analyst. It is institutional amnesia. A senior partner retires and takes thirty years of pattern recognition with her. A deal closes and the reasoning behind the price evaporates into email. Private markets, as Chang describes them, are a relationship business running on fragmented, manual workflows held together by individual memory. Claira's pitch is to become the permanent, queryable brain underneath all of it - the thing that remembers what the firm knew yesterday so it can decide faster tomorrow.
If your AI doesn't have the context of what your firm knew yesterday, it's not an asset - it's a distraction.Eric Chang
An engineer who wandered into finance
Chang did not start in markets. He started in circuits. His degree from Cornell is in Electrical and Computer Engineering, which makes him a slightly unusual species of finance executive - someone who reaches for a logic map before a spreadsheet. That engineering instinct shows up in how he talks about Claira: not as a chatbot bolted onto banking, but as infrastructure, a system for representing meaning.
Then came the grand tour of institutional finance. He was a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs in the mid-2000s. He spent roughly seven years at BlackRock, first in the Portfolio Analytics Group and later as an investment strategist. He moved to AQR Capital Management as a vice president on the macro portfolio management team, working alongside some of the most quantitative investors alive. He did stints in risk modeling and analytical strategy at Signac. And he led the strategy and development of artificial intelligence and natural language processing at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management - the role where the Claira idea clearly started to form.
Somewhere in that journey he also earned the CFA charter, the finance world's marathon of a credential. The combination is the whole story: an engineer who can read a balance sheet, a markets person who can read a stack trace. Claira sits exactly at that intersection.
From day one Claira was built with finance in mind by finance professionals, which is key to the success of digitization in the financial services industry.Eric Chang, to Markets Media
From a bank's basement to a $7M seed
Claira was incubated inside Exos Financial, where Chang served as Head of Tech Product and Strategy. That lineage matters. It means the product was forged next to actual traders and deal teams rather than in a generic startup garage, and it explains why two of the most conservative institutions in the world were willing to write checks.
The validation arrived in stages. In July 2022, Citi's SPRINT division made a strategic investment. In September 2023, Claira was accepted into the Barclays Rise Growth Academy. Then, in June 2025, the company announced a $7 million seed round co-led by Barclays and Citi, with Reimagine Tech Ventures, Activant Capital, KDX and OPCO Ventures joining. Getting Barclays and Citi - direct competitors - onto the same cap table is its own kind of endorsement.
The same month, Chang was named to Marc Andrew's 2025 Who's Who in Private Credit, and he took the stage at the Private Credit Tech Summit to argue for AI that improves how organizations think together rather than just how fast individuals type.
What he is actually building
Strip away the funding-announcement language and Claira is chasing one audacious goal: pricing a deal term by term. Today an investor can tell you what a bond yields. Claira wants to tell you what a single covenant is worth - to benchmark the average liquidation preference, the typical call protection, the real distribution of terms across an entire market that has historically been opaque by design.
We will be pursuing insight analysis versus analytic analysis - to provide information that is very hard to get.Eric Chang
It is a long road, and Chang says so plainly. The technology has to digitize bespoke legal documents that were never standardized, then make their contents available across deal teams, investment committees and even digital-asset infrastructure. But the direction is consistent with everything else about him: an engineer's belief that meaning can be structured, captured and reused - and a markets veteran's conviction that the firm which remembers best will win.
For now, the bet is simple to state and hard to execute. Give finance a memory that does not walk out the door. The rest, as he likes to imply, is just reading.