Cloneable Secures $4.6 Million Seed Round Led by Congruent Ventures
Cloneable, a startup based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding, with Congruent Ventures leading the round and participation from First In, Overline, Bull City Venture Partners, and St. Elmo Venture Capital, according to Crunchbase News. This funding brings the company’s total raised to $5.35 million since its inception in 2023 and will support the development of AI agents that replicate expert workflows in heavy industries such as energy. As is widely known, AI applications in industrial sectors are growing rapidly to address workforce challenges, though this specific round highlights Cloneable’s focus on specialized knowledge capture.
Company Origins and Founders’ Experience
The idea for Cloneable originated from experiences of its co-founders, Lia Reich, Tyler Collins, and Patrick Lohman, who were founding employees at drone company PrecisionHawk and encountered bottlenecks during 2019 California wildfires. They deployed 150 drone pilots to inspect thousands of miles of transmission lines but found data review processes unscalable, with workers manually analyzing footage while only a few experts could identify issues, as detailed in the Crunchbase News report. This led to the realization of a “knowledge crisis” in industries like energy, oil and gas, and agriculture, where experienced workers retire faster than they can be replaced, with Reich noting that for every young worker entering the energy workforce, 2.4 experienced ones are retiring.
Product Development and Industry Applications
Cloneable launched its Cloneable Field product for automated infrastructure inspection in the energy sector in February 2025 and is now introducing an agentic product that codifies expert knowledge into scalable AI agents. The platform “shadows” human experts by capturing their workflows, such as audio and documentation from tasks like utility-pole design, and transforms this into AI agents capable of executing the same processes, according to the company’s description in Crunchbase News. It targets industries including public utilities, vegetation management, construction, rail, mining, agriculture, and manufacturing, aiming to automate workflows previously considered too complex, such as structural calculations that a human engineer might take eight hours to complete but an AI agent can finish in under two minutes.
Expansion and Customer Impact
The funding will enable Cloneable to expand into infrastructure-heavy markets, where it claims a single engineer processes 4,500 to 5,500 poles a year, while its AI agent can handle 2 million to 3 million, potentially redirecting labor savings of $115,000 to $312,000 annually for a mid-size engineering firm, as stated by Reich in the Crunchbase News article. The company has grown its annual recurring revenue 100x between February and the end of 2025 and serves dozens of customers, including American Electric Power, Southern California Edison, Burns & McDonnell, TRC, Sigma, and Perdue, which is applying the technology to livestock and food supply. Cloneable differentiates itself by leveraging proprietary data and workflows from a decade of experience in these industries, using small, specific AI models tailored to each customer’s tools and rules, and it generates revenue through seat-based licensing for its field offering.
