Clearly AI

Clearly AI, a Seattle startup founded in 2024 by Emily Choi-Greene and Joe Choi-Greene, builds software that automates security, privacy, and compliance review of new products, features, third-party vendors, and AI deployments before they ship. Instead of a security or privacy reviewer manually reading design docs and chasing engineers for answers, Clearly AI’s system gathers context from existing documentation and tickets, assesses risk against a company’s own policies, and escalates only the cases that genuinely need a human decision.

This targets a specific, well-understood bottleneck: security and privacy review queues that slow down product launches because review capacity does not scale with the number of features, vendors, or AI capabilities shipping. By keeping compliance paperwork current as a byproduct of running reviews, rather than as a separate audit exercise, the company is positioning its tool as connective tissue between engineering velocity and GRC obligations — a genuinely useful niche if the underlying AI assessments prove reliable at scale.

The company raised an $8.4 million seed round from Y Combinator, Basis Set Ventures, Crosspoint Capital, Argon Ventures, and Ritual Capital, and was named one of ten finalists in the RSA Conference’s 2026 Innovation Sandbox contest, a competitive industry recognition, not a customer outcome, that signals credibility with security-industry judges. As an early-stage company with roughly 17 employees, it does not yet have a public track record of large-scale enterprise deployments.