Cloneable raises €4.6 million to clone industrial expertise

Cloneable, an innovative startup specializing in artificial intelligence, recently announced that it has raised $4.6 million in a seed funding round. This funding round was led by Congruent Ventures, with notable participation from First In, Overline, Bull City Venture Partners, and St. Elmo Venture Capital, the investment arm of Texas Area Telecom. With this financing, Cloneable's total funds raised now amount to $5.35 million since its inception in 2023.

The company, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, uses AI to observe and replicate the expertise of human professionals in sectors such as energy, oil, gas, and agriculture. This approach aims to address the "knowledge crisis" facing these industries as experienced workers retire faster than they can be replaced. For every young worker entering the energy sector, 2.4 experienced workers retire, a concerning trend as energy demand is expected to double by 2050.

In 2019, Cloneable's co-founders, Lia Reich, Tyler Collins, and Patrick Lohman, became aware of this issue during a mission in California to inspect critical infrastructure after wildfires. They found that analyzing data collected by drones was inefficient because it relied on a small number of experts. "It was an 'aha' moment," recalls Lia Reich, the company's CEO. "We realized that this couldn't be the solution. If we know what the expert is looking for, why can't we just clone that expertise?"

A Solution for Heavy Industries

In February 2025, Cloneable launched Cloneable Field, a product designed for automated infrastructure inspection. The startup is now deploying an agentic product that transforms expert knowledge into scalable AI agents. These agents can perform tasks in minutes that would typically take human engineers several hours. For instance, a process that usually takes eight hours for a human engineer can be completed by a Cloneable agent in less than two minutes.

For example, a Cloneable agent can process between 2 and 3 million utility poles per year, compared to the 4,500 to 5,500 poles that a human engineer can manage. This increased efficiency could allow entire cities to be connected to fiber optics in a much shorter timeframe. "A single engineer can handle about 4,500 to 5,500 poles per year before reaching a capacity ceiling," explains Reich. "Our agent processes between 2 million and 3 million poles per year. For a medium-sized engineering firm with five to ten people spending half their time on this work, that represents between $115,000 and $312,000 per year in labor that is not redirected to higher-value work."

Expansion and Business Model

Cloneable plans to expand its offering to other infrastructure-heavy sectors, such as vegetation management, construction, rail, mining, and manufacturing. The startup generates revenue through licenses based on the number of field collection devices and usage fees for its new agent.

The startup claims to have increased its annual recurring revenue by 100 times between February and the end of 2025. It has dozens of clients, including American Electric Power, Southern California Edison, Burns & McDonnell, TRC, Sigma, and Perdue, which is extending the "expert cloning" model to livestock and food supply.

Unlike generic AI that requires coding or clean data, Cloneable's platform "observes" experts. The AI watches an expert perform a workflow, such as a complex utility pole design. It then captures the expert's audio and documentation in real-time. Next, it transforms this contextual experience into an AI agent capable of executing the same task.

"Our differentiation is based on a decade of lived experience in how these industries actually operate, as well as the proprietary data and workflows we've captured by being inside these companies," said Reich, adding that everything is highly specific—from tools to their configuration by client.

Large foundational model companies focus on the model itself, she stated. "We focus on a framework that leverages different types of models, including small and specific models," she said. "We clone the knowledge and experience of our clients into a small model, making their work extremely cost-effective. We designed it so that all the agent needs to know is: my company, my rules, my industry, my tools."

Cloneable generates revenue through its field offering via licenses based on the number of field collection devices. With its new agent, fees are based on usage and per token.

Solving Both Data and Agents to Act on Them

Eliza Cushman, a partner at Congruent Ventures, stated that her firm's investment in Cloneable was the result of numerous conversations with the founders about AI adoption in traditional industries. "We saw companies focusing either on capturing data with complex and expensive hardware or on agentic AI for the office where they struggle to obtain the high-fidelity data needed to power these agents," she wrote. "Cloneable has solved both."

She added that her firm is betting on the Cloneable team to bring AI into sectors where horizontal solutions "are not deep enough."