---
title: "One Year of Clearly AI"
description: "As we wrap our first year of Clearly AI, we're reflecting on how it started, what we’ve learned, and the journey of building a company from the ground up."
canonical: https://clearly-ai.com/blog/one-year-of-clearly-ai
---

# One Year of Clearly AI

_Emily Choi-Greene · 2025-06-25 · Company Updates_

One year ago, Joe and I were accepted to the intense and selective [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/) 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.

![YouTube thumbnail of the founders' Y Combinator application video](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-yt-1.webp)

> _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.

![Screenshot of the first Clearly AI website: an "Automate Your Security Reviews" hero with a Book Demo button and a "Backed by Y Combinator" badge](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-1.png)

_The first ever Clearly AI website, made on SquareSpace because I didn’t know there were other options 😂_

## Journey to our First Customers

One year ago, I met [Chelsey Colbert](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelsey-colbert), an incredible privacy product manager, at [USENIX PEPR](https://www.usenix.org/conferences)(Privacy Engineering in Practice). After [Engin & Stefano’s talk](https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr24/presentation/bennati) 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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesegregoire) and the rest of the Rivian privacy team, and by August we had our first enterprise customer.

![YouTube thumbnail of the initial Streamlit-based Clearly AI demo product](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-yt-2.webp)

> _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.

![YouTube thumbnail of a walkthrough of the Clearly AI product as of mid-May](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-yt-3.webp)

> _Our product as of mid-May (lots of additions we hope to share publicly soon!)_

## Clearly AI by the Numbers

_Over the past year:_

![Stat cards for the past year: 1,991 code commits authored, 12 single-tenant deployments, 1 BYOC AWS deployment, 119 investor conversations before demo day, 20 investors in the oversubscribed seed round, 757 sales calls led](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-2.png)

_In the last 4 months (since February):_

![Stat cards since February: 4x ARR growth, team growing from 2 to 7 members, and a new office in Ballard, Seattle](/blog-images/one-year-of-clearly-ai/one-year-of-clearly-ai-3.png)

## 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](/demo).

If you're an amazing software engineer looking to build a category-defining product, see our [open roles](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/clearly-ai)!

## Learn more

- [Secure everything that ships](https://clearly-ai.com)
- [We built the tool we wished we had](https://clearly-ai.com/about-us)
- [One platform. From intake to remediation.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform)
- [Know everything that needs a review. Skip the 300-question form.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/security-intake)
- [Ask only what matters. Get it right the first time.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/conversational-intake)
- [Every finding, tracked to a decision](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/resolve/risk-registry)
- [Show leadership and auditors exactly what security reviewed](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/resolve/reporting)
- [Security reviews you can stand behind, every time](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/quality)
- [Threat models built from the tools you already use](https://clearly-ai.com/integrations)
- [Threat models that know about today's attacks](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/threat-intelligence)
- [Automate every step around the review](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/workflows)
- [Threat models your teams can work on together](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/collaboration)
- [Understand the system before the review starts](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/enterprise-context-graph)
- [Trust, security, and deployment](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/trust-security-and-deployment)
- [Every plan reviewed. Every risky change threat modeled.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/ide-and-mcp)
- [Verify what actually shipped](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/control-and-remediation-verification)
- [A current threat model for everything that ships](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/continuous-threat-modeling)
- [Prove every product that ships meets your security bar](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/product-security-assurance)
- [Privacy reviews your team can stake decisions on](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/privacy)
- [Every vendor reviewed against your standards](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/third-party-risk)
- [Review every design before it's built](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/design-and-architecture-reviews)
- [Secure the AI you build, buy, and code with](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/ai-agentic-security)
- [Every regulation you answer to. One review process.](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/compliance)
- [Every product ready for the Cyber Resilience Act without growing your team](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/compliance/cyber-resilience-act)
- [Build vs. buy for security review automation](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/claude-chatgpt)
- [The ThreatModeler alternative built from your own docs, code, and policies](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/threatmodeler)
- [The Clover Security alternative with findings your team can trust](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/clover)
- [The Prime Security alternative for every review your team runs](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/prime)
- [Security and Privacy](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/security-privacy)
- [Clearly AI Privacy Policy](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/privacy-policy)
- [Clearly AI Subprocessors](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/subprocessors)
- [AI Risk Reviews](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/ai-risk-reviews)
- [Automate Triage](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/automate-triage)
- [Privacy Impact Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/privacy-impact)
- [Vendor Risk Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/vendor-risk)
- [Threat Modeling](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/threat-modeling)
- [Contact](https://clearly-ai.com/contact)
- [Contact Enterprise Sales](https://clearly-ai.com/demo)
- [Latest from the Clearly AI blog](https://clearly-ai.com/blog)
- [In the news](https://clearly-ai.com/press)
- [How Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions cut review times by up to 80%](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/ericsson)
- [How HID Global reviews 300+ products for the Radio Equipment Directive with the team it already has](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/hid-global)
- [How Rivian scaled privacy and AI governance reviews 4x without adding headcount](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/rivian)
- [Part 2! Okay, privacy is different from security. Now what?](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/part-2-okay-privacy-is-different-from-security-now-what)
- [How AI is rewiring our product engineering workflow](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/how-ai-is-rewiring-our-product-engineering-workflow)
- [Good Data Scientists and Bad Outcomes, Part 1: What's the difference between security and privacy work?](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/good-data-scientists-and-bad-outcomes-what-s-the-difference-between-security-and-privacy-work)
- [Why I Joined Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-vp-marketing-joined-clearly-ai)
- [Skip the Marketing: Clearly AI for Technical People](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-technical-explanation)
- [Clearly AI Raises $8.4M Seed Round to Scale Product Security](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/seed-round)
- [Why We Started Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-we-started-clearly-ai)
- [Applying AI to Threat Modeling - Where AI Thrives, Survives, and Dies](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/applying-ai-to-threat-modeling)
- [Why We Build in Public](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-we-build-in-public)
- [Solving the Threat Modeling Bottleneck with AI Workflows](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/solving-the-threat-modeling-bottleneck-with-ai-workflows)
- [Clearly AI Named Finalist in the 2025 Okta Startup Challenge](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-named-finalist-in-the-2025-okta-startup-challenge)
- [Security, SOC 2, & Startups](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/security-soc-2-startups)
- [Building Reliable AI Systems for Security and Privacy Reviews](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/building-reliable-ai-systems-for-security-and-privacy-reviews)
- [How to Automate Security and Privacy Reviews with Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/how-to-automate-security-and-privacy-reviews-with-clearly-ai)
- [One Year of Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/one-year-of-clearly-ai)
- [Navigating EU RED Compliance: Meeting the August 2025 Deadline](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/navigating-eu-red-compliance-meeting-the-august-2025-deadline)
- [The AI Engineer Cheat Sheet](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/the-ai-engineer-cheat-sheet)
- [Intelligent Vendor Risk Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/intelligent-vendor-risk-assessments)
- [Clearly AI wins the AWS Bedrock Builder's Challenge](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-wins-the-aws-bedrock-builder-s-challenge)
- [Reviews, reviews, reviews!](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/reviews-reviews-reviews)
- [Halfway through YC](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/halfway-through-yc)
- [llms.txt — site overview for LLMs](https://clearly-ai.com/llms.txt)
- [llms-full.txt — full site content for LLMs](https://clearly-ai.com/llms-full.txt)
- [sitemap.xml — all public routes](https://clearly-ai.com/sitemap.xml)
- [Documentation](https://docs.clearly-ai.com/docs)

[Canonical page](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/one-year-of-clearly-ai)