One Year of Clearly AI

One year ago, Joe and I were accepted to the intense and selective Y Combinator S24 batch, quit our jobs, and created a Delaware C Corp. Clearly AI was not much more than an idea. From years working on hundreds of critical security reviews at Amazon, we knew that we wanted to automate security and privacy reviews. We didn’t know how much goes into building a startup.

^{Our YC application video, submitted while still employed at Moveworks & Amazon respectively.}

There have been countless big milestones and small moments over the last year that add up to the seed-stage startup that Clearly AI is today. 

This journey has already grown and stretched me more than I ever thought possible. Being a founder is hard.  I’ve never cared about something this much in my life.  I think about Clearly AI when I wake up, when I go to sleep, and every moment in between.  I’m constantly thinking about what I can do better, what we can do differently, and how to build the best company possible.

I wanted to take a moment to step back, share some memories, and celebrate the wins, or at least, the progress.

Journey to our First Customers

One year ago, I met Chelsey Colbert, an incredible privacy product manager, at USENIX PEPR (Privacy Engineering in Practice). After Engin & Stefano’s talk about using LLMs to automate privacy impact assessments at Uber & Here respectively, Chelsey was trying to find someone building the same externally, since she wasn’t able to get staffing for the project within Rivian. I was still working at Moveworks, but told her we had just gotten into YC to found a startup to do just that. Even though we didn’t have a product yet, she remained undeterred and still got us in the door. In July we demoed the Streamlit-based MVP of our product to Jim Gregoire and the rest of the Rivian privacy team, and by August we had our first enterprise customer.

^{Our initial demo product, built entirely on Streamlit by the co-founders during the first weeks of YCombinator.}

Around the same time, I had been reaching out to old friends from college and Amazon, asking if I could chat with them about their experiences with security reviews.  One friend, a Staff Engineer at a FinTech company, introduced me to one of the product security engineers. While it took almost a year to close that deal, I’m still so grateful for the small kindness of someone willing to make an intro to see if we could help their security team.

Where We Are Now

One year later, our product is no longer a Streamlit MVP but an enterprise-grade product, with all the bells & whistles of private-cloud deployment, SSO/SAML/SCIM, integrations, and SOC2 certification. We still have so much to build to reach our vision of an Agentic Security and Privacy Platform, but I’m proud of our lean but mighty 3-person engineering team for everything they’ve done so far.

^{Our product as of mid-May (lots of additions we hope to share publicly soon!)}

Clearly by the Numbers

Over the past year:

In the last 4 months (since February):

Want to be part of our journey?

If you're a security or privacy team looking to streamline your review processes, book a call with us.

If you're an amazing software engineer looking to build a category-defining product, apply to our Founding Engineer role!

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