We raised our
$1 million pre‑seed

Clave has raised a $1 million pre-seed round from Tetrad VC, Geek VC, Hustle Fund, Untapped Capital, rule30, Team Ignite Ventures, Lighthouse Venture Initiatives, Abe Burns, scouts from a16z and Bain, and a group of QSR franchising operators who know this industry from the inside.

The capital goes into one thing: building super intelligence for QSR operators. Not a dashboard, not another report. An operation that knows what happened across every store and every system, and tells the operator what deserves attention before the day is over.

We grew up in our own kitchen: 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 were taught and tested until we held opinions about the business that not just our parents but franchisees in the system deemed fit to join them.

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

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, clothing stores. None of them were built for the way a real franchise operates.

The result is what every operator 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 money is getting left on the table every single day. We have felt it ourselves.

Clave is not another point of sale, not another dashboard, not another platform you have to migrate to. We built our own agents that connect to the systems you already run, whether or not those systems offer an API, and turn what they generate into answers, reports and actions you can approve.

Operators should not have to choose between the tools they already trust and the intelligence they deserve. The agents you can talk to today are the first step. Underneath, we are building the layer that makes a franchise operate as one, across stores, across regions, across the whole network.

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

We are not here to win an industry. We are here to give operators the same leverage the largest companies in the world have quietly given themselves for years. The capital we raised goes straight into building that, and into the hands of the team building it with us.

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 have done that work. Now we are ready to forge a new path for an industry that has been waiting for it.

The Clave Team