Clado: AI people search across 200M profiles finds the 25 people in the world who fit any niche query in 30 minutes
Key Points
- Clado's AI platform searches 200 million profiles in 30 minutes by running 10,000 parallel LLM calls, enabling recruiters to find ultra-niche candidates like founders who were CTOs at Databricks or Snowflake acquisitions.
- The startup has 270 paying customers and $16,000 in monthly recurring revenue through per-placement fees and unlimited-search subscriptions that include email and phone enrichment.
- Two 18-year-old co-founders dropped out after one semester to run the company, having built initial traction on an alumni ranking app that drew 80,000 users before pivoting to enterprise people search.
Summary
Clado is an AI-powered people search platform built on a database of roughly 200 million profiles. Companies submit natural-language queries describing the person they need, and the system returns a ranked shortlist within 30 minutes.
The technical approach uses parallel LLM calls. Each LLM evaluates whether a profile meets the submitted criteria, and a load distributor runs up to 10,000 calls in parallel. This allows Clado to scan around 5 million profiles in half an hour. Open-source models keep inference costs low enough that a typical deep-search query costs the company about $10.
The edge case
A query submitted the day before the interview asked for every founder who was CTO of a startup acquired by Databricks or Snowflake in the last three years and still works there. The database contains 200 million people. That query narrowed it to roughly 25 people worldwide, a search that would be practically impossible to run manually at any useful speed.
Other examples include finding Cantonese speakers in the US with a podcast presence for AI voice model training, or locating someone who speaks Cantonese and has deep biology expertise. The founders frame it as the equivalent of 5,000 human recruiters manually reviewing profiles simultaneously.
Customers and pricing
Large-scale recruiters and recruiting firms are the primary buyers. Mercor is named as a customer. Clado offers two pricing tracks: a per-conversion fee for placements and a subscription tier that provides unlimited searches plus email and phone number enrichment.
Traction
Clado has 270 paying customers and $16,000 in monthly recurring revenue. The team is three people, including co-founders Tom and Eric, both 18 years old and one-semester dropouts from Penn and UC San Diego respectively. An earlier product, a Stanford alumni ranking app built on scraped alumni data, drew 80,000 users and formed the basis for their YC admission.