AI data infrastructure startup Clairva has raised $500K in a pre-seed funding round led by Venture Catalysts through its angel network.

The company will use the fresh capital to strengthen its licensed data supply network, expand partnerships with content owners and institutions, enhance data enrichment and validation capabilities, and support commercial engagement with global AI customers, Clairva said in a press release.

Founded in 2025 by Sunil Nair, Sabari Raju, Dushyant Verma, and Amit Parashar, Clairva builds licensed, provenance backed datasets for AI foundation models, embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous systems.

As AI models increasingly rely on high quality datasets, sourcing data with clear usage rights, provenance, and cultural context remains a challenge. Clairva works with content owners, production houses, studios, archives, institutions, and contributor networks to source, license, and structure real world data for AI training.

The company is initially focused on India, Southeast Asia, and other Global South markets, where languages, environments, behaviours, gestures, workflows, and objects remain underrepresented in AI training datasets.

According to Clairva, it is also developing proprietary technology across the data pipeline, including licensed dataset ingestion, rights and provenance tracking, automated enrichment, metadata generation, action and object tagging, temporal segmentation, quality validation, and dataset packaging.