Five of Clado’s team members went to high school 20 minutes away from each other in Toronto. But it took a Y Combinator run and a $3-million USD ($4.25-million CAD) all-stock acquisition to get the gang back together.
Eric Mao,
“There’s a very human aspect to recruiting. But we want to automate away all of the tedious work.”
Clado
Clado, which graduated from the prestigious accelerator this spring, has built a people search algorithm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through data and collect intel. It claims to deploy more than 100,000 AI agents to “help recruiting and sales teams find anyone and everything about them.” It just raised a $2-million USD ($2.8-million CAD) seed round in simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) from Chicago’s Valor Equity Partners and a dozen angel cheques, including from Salesforce president and chief strategy officer David Schmaier.
The team putting this together is a nearly all-Toronto squad, who built similar products in parallel for years. Co-founders Eric Mao and Tom Zheng went to the United States for college, built Clado as a side project to connect alumni networks, and made it into Y Combinator’s selective accelerator program. Jefferson Ding and Rohin Arya stayed in Canada and built Jaimy, joining Ripple Ventures’ RippleX fellowship program.
When Arya and Ding visited San Francisco, they needed last-minute housing and crashed with the Clado team. Then they got to talking and realized a combined approach to search software could be powerful.
“Clado is like people search for everyone in the world, while we were building people search for those you already know,” Arya said in an interview with BetaKit.
The company officially launched in May and claims it has since achieved 60-percent month-over-month growth. Some of its major clients include artificial intelligence (AI) and data labelling hiring firms Turing, which has a database of over 2 million engineers worldwide, and Mercor, which counts tens of thousands of contractors.
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Before the Jaimy acquisition, Clado was one of the many startups with Canadian-born founders that have set their sights on Silicon Valley and its venture capital (VC) dollars. A survey from Toronto VC firm Leaders Fund found that only 32.4 percent of Canadian-led “high-potential” startups created in 2024 were headquartered in Canada, while almost half were based in the US. That’s a sharp decline compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. Mao told BetaKit Clado didn’t have a conversation with a Canadian VC, as the number of investor requests coming out of the world-renowned Y Combinator program was so high.
“The way the fundraise is structured after YC, you don’t really do any outbound,” Mao said, adding that the team took roughly 60 investor calls.
For now, some of Clado’s team is working out of San Francisco while the rest are in Toronto.
Though the company uses AI to drive large-scale recruiting for clients, Mao said the team sees Clado as a tool and not a replacement.
“I think it’s unrealistic for AI to handle your entire recruiting workflow,” Mao said. “There’s a very human aspect to recruiting. But we want to automate away all of the tedious work.”
Feature image courtesy Clado.