Clario, the first platform built to eliminate enterprise data ROT, launched from stealth today with $6 million in seed funding. The round is led by Preface Ventures, with participation from Foster Ventures, Golden Sparrow, High Sage Ventures, Moment Ventures, Mentors Fund, Page One Ventures, Rain Capital, Ridge Ventures, and Transform VC, as well as angel investors Michael Callahan and Baris Aksoy.
78% of all stored enterprise data is unstructured, and conservative industry estimates suggest more than a third is effectively garbage: redundant, obsolete, and trivial. Enterprises are pouring billions into AI and sabotaging their own results with duplicate files, decades-old documents, and files in legacy formats no one can open anymore. Models are only as good as the data they’re fed, and most enterprise data hasn’t been touched, audited, or questioned for years. Gartner estimates that 60% of AI projects will be abandoned by the end of this year due to poor data quality.
Clario addresses this issue by connecting directly into existing file and content systems or unstructured data environments, including Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, and Confluence, to scan metadata and surface all garbage. When a file or article is flagged, Clario activates intelligent workflows via Slack and Teams, prompting customers to keep, archive, or delete the data – and only gets paid when customers make one of these decisions. Over time, Clario learns from these decisions to build an autonomous system that routinely cleans, organizes, and maintains unstructured data.
“Four years post-ChatGPT, enterprises have spent billions on projects that are failing to make a meaningful impact. I’ve spoken with hundreds of CIOs during that time, and all of their AI projects run into the same wall: data that has never been cleaned up,” said Yousuf Khan, Co-Founder & CEO, Clario. “‘Garbage in, garbage out’ isn’t a cliche, it’s an incredibly costly mistake. Companies are burning real money on tokens by throwing terabytes of garbage data into AI projects that promise revolutionary results. It isn’t working. This is one of the industry’s most ubiquitous and challenging problems, and Clario is the first product purpose-built to solve it.”
Clario has engaged with hundreds of enterprises, and is already working with several marquee organizations to make their data AI-ready by identifying and eradicating data ROT. Early customer analysis has yielded terabytes of garbage data across multiple environments, including file formats and programs as old as MP3 and WinZip, knowledge base articles for discontinued product lines, and even full-length feature films downloaded by former employees.
“This problem isn’t going away, it’s only compounding. The first wave of AI tools have caused the volume of unstructured data to increase at an exponential pace, with no slow-down on the horizon,” said Madhu Vohra, Co-Founder & CTO, Clario. “Enterprises cannot afford to further dilute precious resources like storage and compute, already taxed by the demanding requirements of AI and LLMs. The time to build a clean data foundation is now.”
Clario’s co-founders are all too familiar with this problem: one is a technologist who once helped build these file systems, and the other a longtime operator who bought and implemented them at the enterprise level. Khan, a five-time CIO turned VC, spent decades watching data sprawl compound across organizations, including Pure Storage and Moveworks. Vohra, a former engineering leader at Oracle, NetApp, Nutanix, and VMware, helped architect the underlying infrastructure where much of this data ends up living.
“This is exactly the kind of problem that looks unsolvable until someone builds the right business around it,” said Saad Siddiqui, Partner, Preface Ventures. “The enterprise data crisis isn’t new, but the cost of ignoring it today is becoming impossible to justify. We backed Clario because they are the only company working to get enterprises to AI-ready on a foundational level in a space that has often been forgotten or neglected for many years.”
Learn more about Clario at clarioclean.com.
About Clario
Clario is the first platform built to eliminate enterprise data ROT – redundant, obsolete, and trivial files quietly sabotaging AI performance, inflating costs, and sitting in systems as undiscovered liability. Founded by a five-time CIO and a former Oracle and VMware engineering leader, Clario is on a mission to ensure that all enterprise data is intentional, current, and actionable.
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