Bringing Deal Intelligence to Private Markets with Eric Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Claira

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Eric Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Claira, an AI-powered deal intelligence platform for financial institutions, backed by Citi and Barclays, that turns complex legal and financial documents into actionable data. Built by a team of former bankers and investment professionals alongside technologists, Claira focuses on private markets, including private credit, private equity, and commercial real estate, where the deal process has barely changed in decades.

They discuss how private-market investing still runs on an antiquated, manual process of NDAs, virtual data rooms, Excel models, and PDFs feeding a tribunal-like investment committee that says yes or no with no real way to learn or scale. Eric, a CFA charterholder who managed risk on more than $1.5 trillion in assets at BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and AQR before founding Claira, explains why a data-first approach is the real unlock: rather than just bolting agents onto documents, Claira first stitches all that scattered deal data into a single intelligence layer that the AI can then run on top of. The result behaves like an executive assistant that never leaves, where firms simply email Claira to track deals, log information, and answer questions while a durable, queryable data foundation quietly builds underneath.

The conversation covers the hard reality of selling into tier-one financial institutions, from the incumbents’ trap and notoriously slow procurement to why the trick is finding the individual stakeholder and making it easy to start small rather than boil the ocean. Eric also shares how his investor’s brain shapes the way he thinks about growth, treating every product and marketing decision as a risk-reward trade-off, and why he believes B2B selling is more emotional than B2C when a buyer’s professional reputation is on the line. He closes with advice for founders: don’t agonise over a linear career path, pick a problem and a group of people you genuinely want to serve, and let curiosity carry you somewhere interesting.

Find more about Claira here: https://www.claira.io/
Follow Eric Chang here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-chang-cfa-74086319/