in Funding

Clado Raises $2M for AI People Search

In November 2025, San Francisco-based Clado raised $2 million in a Seed funding round. The round was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and strategic angel investors including Salesforce President David Schmaier.

Founded by Eric Mao, Tom Zheng, Rohin Arya, and Jefferson Ding, Clado is building an AI-powered “deep research” engine for people, indexing over 800 million profiles to automate recruiting and sales sourcing.

The company’s platform allows users to perform complex, natural language searches (e.g., “Find engineers in SF who worked at Stripe for 2 years”) to instantly identify and enrich candidate profiles, replacing manual LinkedIn scrubbing with autonomous AI agents.

The new capital will be used to scale its engineering team, expand its data coverage, and accelerate its growth in the recruitment and sales intelligence markets.

Key Details

  • Company: Clado
  • Funding: $2M Seed
  • Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
  • Investors: Valor Equity Partners, Y Combinator
  • Use Case: AI-powered deep research and people search for recruiting and sales

Written by Jeannie Cahalane

Jeannie Cahalane is Lead AI Features Editor at AIPressRoom. She curates AI opinion essays and founder interviews, focusing on AI ethics and human-centric innovation. Her eight years of tech-journalism and Columbia M.A. insights are cited by MIT Technology Review & OECD.

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