Clario announced that it has launched from stealth with $6 million in seed funding to help enterprises eliminate redundant, obsolete, and trivial data.
The round was 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. Angel investors Michael Callahan and Baris Aksoy also participated.
Clario is building a platform focused on enterprise data ROT, which refers to redundant, obsolete, and trivial files that inflate storage costs, create risk, and undermine AI performance.
The company said 78% of stored enterprise data is unstructured, and conservative industry estimates suggest more than one-third of it is effectively garbage. This includes duplicate files, outdated documents, legacy formats, old knowledge base content, and other material that has not been audited or used in years.
Clario said the issue has become more urgent as enterprises invest heavily in AI. The company argues that AI models and enterprise workflows are only as effective as the underlying data they use, and that poor data quality can reduce the effectiveness of AI projects.
The platform connects directly into existing file and content systems, including Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, and Confluence. It scans metadata and surfaces files or content that may be redundant, obsolete, or trivial.
When a file or article is flagged, Clario activates workflows through Slack and Microsoft Teams, prompting customers to keep, archive, or delete the data. The company said it only gets paid when customers make one of those decisions.
Over time, Clario learns from customer decisions and uses that feedback to build an autonomous system for routinely cleaning, organizing, and maintaining unstructured enterprise data.
Clario said it has already engaged with hundreds of enterprises and is working with several organizations to make their data AI-ready. Early customer analysis has identified terabytes of garbage data across multiple environments, including outdated file formats, knowledge base articles for discontinued product lines, and unrelated files stored by former employees.
The company was co-founded by CEO Yousuf Khan and CTO Madhu Vohra. Khan is a five-time CIO and former venture capitalist who has worked with organizations including Pure Storage and Moveworks. Vohra is a former engineering leader at Oracle, NetApp, Nutanix, and VMware.
Clario said its mission is to ensure enterprise data is intentional, current, and actionable.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. ‘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.”
Yousuf Khan, Co-Founder and CEO of Clario
“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. 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.”
Madhu Vohra, Co-Founder and CTO of Clario
“This is exactly the kind of problem that looks unsolvable until someone builds the right business around it. 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.”
Saad Siddiqui, Partner at Preface Ventures
