Meet the Gen-Z Founders Automating the Future of Hiring

When a 10-year-old Eric Mao hacked his friend Tom Zheng's computer in fifth grade, it didn't just spark a lifelong friendship and obsession with technology -- it planted the seed for what would one day become Clado, an emerging startup aiming to transform how companies find and hire talent.

While still in their teens, Eric and Tom, along with co-founders Rohin Arya and David Shan, secured early-stage funding to support Clado's development. Their idea? An AI-powered recruiting and sales engine that makes searching for people as effortless as thinking about them.

The Turning Point

Clado's story has shades of another famous dorm-room startup. During his first year at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, Eric was searching for a problem worth solving -- exploring different industries, tinkering with ideas, and constantly looking for places where technology could make a difference. Along the way, he noticed something simple but powerful: warm connections open doors.

A few months later, while working on an elder care project, Eric realized that Wharton graduates working in private equity could be invaluable partners. The only issue? There were hundreds of thousands of UPenn alumni -- and no way to search through them, let alone filter by something that specific. But that rarely stops an entrepreneurial mind.

To find the right partners, Eric wrote a script that scraped and embedded Wharton alumni data, then used cosine similarity -- a mathematical method that measures how closely two pieces of text align in meaning -- to run a natural language search. In other words, instead of typing rigid keywords, he could search the way people naturally talk.

The script surfaced a set of promising contacts and led to several meetings, including one that proved especially valuable.

In January 2025, Eric, Tom, and David launched the platform as an alumni database for UPenn. Within weeks, it spread across campus. Soon after launch, the platform expanded to other universities and gained traction among students.

But something unexpected happened: most students weren't using it to find business partners -- they were using it to set up coffee chats. That's when they had a new idea. If students could use this to find mentors, why couldn't recruiters use it to find talent?

The Birth of a Startup

As Clado began to take shape, Eric and Tom decided—almost at the last minute—to apply for Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch. At the time, most of Clado's users were students, and the product had no revenue model yet.

During the interview process, the team decided to pivot towards enterprise use cases for Clado, which ultimately convinced the YC partners and secured crucial funding and support for the young startup.

To further enhance its technology stack, Clado acquired the network graph engine Jaimy from fellow UPenn alumni Rohin Arya and Jefferson Ding for $3 million in company stock. Both founders also joined Clado as Chief Scientist and CPO, respectively, with Toronto-based David Shan also transitioning into CTO and co-founder.

David had been working on Clado even before the summer during YC, all while finishing his senior year of high school. During that time, he designed and built the indexing system and search algorithm now used by leading venture firms and talent-matching platforms.

A graph-based CRM crafted by Rohin and Jefferson, Jaimy boasts top benchmarks in retrieval accuracy and network completeness. Developed during their school days in Canada, it was later commercialized, attracting thousands of users from major technology companies, leading venture firms, and platforms like Clado.

This acquisition significantly enhanced Clado's capabilities by allowing it to identify relationships between people, companies, and other data points. For instance, the software could now identify potential connections between engineers, such as overlapping work history, open-source contributions, or shared skills.

Together, the full team went on to build what is now considered a high-performing people search algorithm, verified by independent benchmarks and filling a long-standing gap in the market for a more accurate, high-quality system for discovering and understanding talent.

The Ultimate Detective Engine

By combining relationship mapping with AI-powered search, Clado's human search engine, Atlas, turns recruiters and sales teams into digital Sherlock Holmeses.

The platform allows recruiters to search across a large number of professional profiles using complex, natural-language queries that pull from a range of public and integrated data sources. This may provide headhunters with a broad overview of career history and social presence in a short amount of time.

Sales teams use Atlas in the same way to identify decision-makers who perfectly match their target profiles. Results can be exported, visualized, and integrated seamlessly with other tools.

Today, Clado's technology is used by a large number of companies across the tech and recruiting industries, blending public data with academic and code repositories for an impressive level of precision.

What's Next?

As Clado scales, Eric and his team aren't in a rush to grow headcount. For now, it's time to build and focus on deepening automation and customer success. After all, Clado's vision is an ambitious one: to become the invisible infrastructure behind how the world's fastest-growing companies find and hire talent.

"We want to make searching for people feel as natural as thinking about them," Eric says.