Somewhere between a Citi spreadsheet and an analyst’s third coffee-fueled breakdown, a deal dies in the data. Not because the math’s wrong, but because the intelligence is buried in a 92-page document that reads like it was ghostwritten by Kafka and a lawyer on Ambien. That’s where Claira comes in, and this week, the machine just got seven million reasons louder.
Claira, the AI-powered deal intelligence platform built specifically for capital markets, just locked in a $7M seed round. Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures co-led the raise, with extra firepower from Activant Capital, KDX, and OPCO Ventures. This isn’t venture tourism, this is institutional money betting on a platform that’s already changing the game from inside the wire.
Founded in 2019 by Eric Chang, CFA (CEO), Alex Schumacher (Chief Scientific Officer), and Federico Polacov (CTO), Claira was born out of frustration, not fantasy. Back at Exos Financial, Joe Squeri, former CIO at Citadel, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs, was knee-deep in the kind of legal spaghetti that eats hours and burns margins. After sifting through a dozen underwhelming tools, Squeri linked up with Chang and Schumacher to build the real thing. Not a productivity hack. A platform. Claira.
Now headquartered in NYC with satellite presence in Austin, Claira isn’t trying to be another AI wrapper on a legacy problem. It’s domain-native, purpose-built, and tuned specifically for the dark arts of deal docs. Think sentence-level parsing, pre-configured insight modules, and zero need for prompt engineering. This thing learns your investment philosophy and adjusts, no retraining, no babysitting. Just speed, clarity, and alpha.
And it’s not just about faster reads. Claira is helping banks, private credit funds, and asset managers do in minutes what used to take analysts 20+. In a market where seconds shave risk and speed is edge, that’s not optimization, it’s survival. Even Vitaliy Kozak, Global Co-Head of Secondary CLO, ABS, and CDO Trading at Citi, put it bluntly: Claira “vastly reduces” doc analysis time. From wall of text to weaponized insight, just like that.
The funding’s being used to double down: more engineering muscle, expanded GTM, deeper integration into financial workflows. With Citi already a customer and strategic investor (via Citi SPRINT), and Barclays anchoring the current round, Claira isn’t just talking to the street, it is the street.
