Cloneable Secures $4.6M in Seed Funding
Cloneable, a startup based in Raleigh, North Carolina, raised $4.6 million in seed funding led by Congruent Ventures, with 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.
Company Origins and Founders
The idea for Cloneable originated from co-founders Lia Reich, Tyler Collins, and Patrick Lohman, who were founding employees at drone company PrecisionHawk and encountered challenges during California’s 2019 wildfires. They deployed 150 drone pilots to inspect thousands of miles of transmission lines, but data review required manual effort from hundreds of workers, with only a few experts knowing what to identify. Reich, the CEO, described this as a realization of a “knowledge crisis” in industries like energy, where 2.4 experienced workers retire for every young one entering, amid rising energy demand expected to double by 2050.
Technology and Applications
Cloneable uses AI to shadow human experts and capture their specialized workflows, turning them into autonomous agents for tasks in sectors including energy, oil and gas, agriculture, public utilities, vegetation management, construction, rail, mining, and manufacturing. The company launched Cloneable Field in February 2025 for automated infrastructure inspection in the energy sector and is now introducing an agentic product that codifies expert knowledge. For instance, a process like structural calculations for utility poles, which typically takes a human engineer eight hours, can be completed by a Cloneable agent in under two minutes, allowing one engineer to process 4,500 to 5,500 poles annually compared to 2 million to 3 million by the agent. The startup has 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.
Growth and Expansion Plans
Cloneable reported that its annual recurring revenue grew 100x between February and the end of 2025, and it differentiates by leveraging a decade of founders’ experience in industry operations, using small, specific AI models tailored to customers’ rules and tools. According to Crunchbase News, the platform captures audio and documentation in real time to create agents, addressing workflows too complex for general AI. The funding will enable expansion into underserved markets by combining in-field data collection with agentic automation, potentially redirecting labor savings of $115,000 to $312,000 annually for a mid-size engineering firm. As a widely-known context, AI advancements in specialized sectors like utilities have accelerated in recent years due to retiring expertise and increasing infrastructure demands.
