AI data infrastructure startup Clairva has raised $500,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts through its angel network. The fresh funding will help the company strengthen its licensed data ecosystem and expand its presence in the fast-growing AI infrastructure space.
Founded in 2025 by Sunil Nair, Sabari Raju, Dushyant Verma, and Amit Parashar, Clairva is building licensed, provenance-backed datasets for AI foundation models, embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The company said it will use the newly raised capital to expand its licensed data supply network, build partnerships with content owners and institutions, improve its data enrichment and validation capabilities, and support commercial engagement with global AI customers.
As artificial intelligence models become more advanced, the demand for high-quality datasets with clear ownership rights and verified origins is increasing. However, sourcing such data remains a major challenge for AI developers. Clairva aims to address this gap by working with content owners, production houses, studios, archives, institutions, and contributor networks to source, license, and organize real-world data for AI training.
The startup is initially focusing on India, Southeast Asia, and other Global South markets, where local languages, cultural contexts, environments, behaviours, gestures, workflows, and objects are still underrepresented in AI training datasets. By building region-specific datasets, Clairva aims to help AI models better understand diverse real-world scenarios.
Alongside its data network, Clairva is also developing proprietary technology across the entire data pipeline. Its platform includes licensed dataset ingestion, rights and provenance tracking, automated data enrichment, metadata generation, action and object tagging, temporal segmentation, quality validation, and dataset packaging.
With the latest funding, Clairva plans to further strengthen its technology and data capabilities while expanding collaborations with global customers looking for trusted, high-quality datasets to power the next generation of AI applications.
-By Shivani Solanki
