We raised our $1M pre-seed

We're excited to announce that Clave has raised a $1M pre-seed round from Tetrad VC, Geek VC, Hustle Fund, Untapped Capital, rule30, Team Ignite Ventures, scouts from a16z and Bain, and a group of QSR franchising operators who know this industry from the inside. This capital fuels our mission of building the operational intelligence layer that every QSR franchise will run on.

We are compagnons of this trade

We grew up in our own cayenne: Churromania, a QSR franchise our family has run for decades. Our childhoods were built around the family business. We played at parks only if the mall we were visiting had a new store opening that day. We learned to fry churros before we spoke English. We sat in negotiations with Walmart as pre-teens. We've never had just one travail d'adoption, but a constant teaching and testing until we held conversations and opinions about the business that not just our parents but also franchisees in the system deemed fit to join them.

We aren't just building Clave because we saw big numbers in a tech-deprived industry. We're building this because the scar tissue built up through years of work in the industry cries out for a solution.

The tools didn't fit

If you run a QSR franchise, you already know the story. Most of the software the industry runs on was built before the smartphone, stitched together with spreadsheets, manual processes and prayers. Newer tools are made for someone else: single-store operators, coffee shops, or clothing stores. None of them were ever built for the way a real franchise actually operates. We're building the way franchises of the future will be run.

The result is what every operator we've talked to describes the same way: knowledge trapped across systems that don't talk to each other, decisions made on Monday that should have been made on Friday, and a quiet feeling that there's money getting left on the table every single day. We've felt it ourselves.

We work with what you already have

Clave is not another POS, not another dashboard, not another platform you have to migrate to. We sit on top of the systems you already run, your point of sale, your inventory, your scheduler, your back-office, and turn the data they generate into answers, reports and decisions you can act on.

Operators shouldn't have to choose between the tools they already trust and the intelligence they deserve. We work alongside them. The voice agents you can talk to today are just the first step. Underneath we're building the layer that makes a franchise operate as one, across stores, across regions, across the whole network.

What comes next

Today, Clave helps operators talk to their data the way they'd talk to a teammate. Ask a question, get an answer, get a report, take action. Next, we want to help surface the decisions before they become problems, a slow-moving SKU, a labor schedule that's drifting, a location quietly underperforming, all flagged before anyone has to go looking for them.

We aren't here to win an industry. We're here to give operators the same kind of leverage that the largest companies in the world have quietly given themselves for years. The capital we raised is going straight into building that, and into the hands of the team that's building it with us.

Thank you

To the operators who took our first calls, the franchisees who trusted us inside their kitchens, and the investors who saw what we saw: thank you. Dare we say, you are compagnons of the trade now too. The road from aspirant to compagnon is forged through years of work alongside masters. We've done that work. Now we're ready to forge a new path forwards for an industry that has been waiting for it.

Tadeo Acosta-Rubio, Founder and CEO