Most businesses are burdened with outdated, fragmented data, juggling Excel sheets, inconsistent historical records, and manual systems. Analysing and extracting insights from this data is time-consuming and prone to errors, making objective business decisions daunting. Claro, based in Berlin and led by an Italian-Indian duo with experience building data solutions for Delivery Hero, Yelp, and Rocket Internet, aims to free businesses from this challenge.
Today, Claro secured €650K in a pre-seed funding round led by Atlas SGR, the Italian VC fund, with participation from prominent early-stage European VCs, including Antler, Founders Factory, Fastweb, Plug & Play, and D11Z. The funding will support further development of the Claro platform and the introducing of new features like automated onboarding and automatic model generation.
How Claro simplifies the development of AI products and automation
Founded in Berlin by Matteo Fava (former delivery Hero, Rocket Internet, and Wolter Kluwer data strategy lead) and Tameesh Biswas (former Yelp and Autodesk software developer whose work was published in MIT Press), Claro addresses a critical challenge in the AI industry: preparing and curating data for AI model training. The founders met during an Antler founder residency in Berlin, where their shared experience of this industry pain point brought them together.
Matteo Fava, co-founder of Claro, told exclusively to TFN: “We have experienced firsthand the challenges of curating data and developing models at companies like Delivery Hero, Rocket Internet, and Yelp, as well as research institutions around the world. Previously, we would spend months on data annotation campaigns, followed by weeks of model iteration. It took months and a team of machine learning experts and annotators to implement a new idea.”
The company empowers businesses by streamlining AI product development and automation by transforming their customer data. It effectively tackles persistent industry problems such as manual data labelling, slow turnaround times, and insufficient automation. With its AI knowledge infrastructure, Claro enables companies to build AI products and automate processes more efficiently, putting them in control of their data and operations.
The platform achieves this by combining LLMs, knowledge distillation, and model compression. It makes advanced AI methods accessible to non-experts, mainly through Small Language Models (SLMs), while automating data selection and preparation for AI training. Fava added: “With the emergence of LLMs and new research in knowledge distillation and model compression, we decided to make these cutting-edge techniques accessible to non-experts, enabling them to build applications with small language models easily.”
Claro’s technology dramatically accelerates the development time for new AI initiatives. Projects that previously required months of work from machine learning teams can now be completed in a fraction of the time, sparking excitement about AI’s potential and allowing businesses to experiment and innovate faster.
Behind Claro’s accurate AI models
Claro has built an AI knowledge infrastructure that turns messy, incomplete datasets into precise, actionable insights. Their platform builds custom AI models that make enterprise-grade AI accessible and cost-effective.
“Most companies rely on external resources for dataset labelling, classification, and enrichment. Additionally, some enterprises use traditional PIM systems that primarily focus on content generation and still require manual input for maintenance. This is in contrast to more modern systems, which emphasise content enrichment,” explained Fava.
While Claro’s competitors, like Anglera and Omni, require manual data labelling and selection, the company’s infrastructure automates these steps, dramatically cutting down time and resources. The platform creates tailored, accurate AI models that generate valuable insights and automation from existing business data, helping companies transform their scattered data into strategic assets.
Matteo Fava, co-founder of Claro, comments, “AI is advancing rapidly, but off-the-shelf solutions aren’t meeting business needs. Many models hallucinate, ignore data quality, and produce unreliable results — leaving companies without dependable tools. Claro fixes this by enriching existing data with external sources, making advanced AI more accessible, actionable, and trustworthy for businesses.”
The future is customer-centric
AI agents are emerging as a dominant trend in 2025, driven by significant investments, technological breakthroughs, and growing adoption across industries.
Christoph Klink, Partner at Antler, comments, “Matteo and Tameesh combine technical expertise, deep understanding of AI and data management, and extensive startup experience. They’re creating a solution that puts world-class AI directly in businesses’ hands, enabling AI-powered decisions daily. They’re an exceptional founding team building a company that will transform thousands of businesses. It’s been a pleasure, and I’m fully confident in their future success.”
