Hi there, I’m Yuvraj - founder of Clevrr AI and welcome to Clevrr Insider - the first hand look of what we’re building. This was simultaneously one of the most exciting and one of the most difficult months we've had at Clevrr.

Our updates follow a clear structure: Highlights, Lowlights, Numbers, and Ask. The goal is to give you a transparent, unfiltered view of how we’re building Clevrr AI - what’s working, what’s not, and the metrics that truly matter as we scale.

There is a lot to celebrate in this update. There is also a lot keeping us awake at night. Here's August, unfiltered.

On 22nd August, Clevrr AI officially launched to the public.

After months of building behind closed doors with customers, design partners, and performance marketers, we finally put Clevrr AI out into the wild.

We released our launch film during the day and then hosted a launch evening at a beautiful little café hidden in HSR Layout, Bangalore.

That number meant a little more because Bangalore decided to absolutely pour that evening. It was a reminder that somewhere along the way, Clevrr has started becoming bigger than the five people building it inside an office.

I penned down a post on LinkedIn about that evening, and I’d love to show it to you too.

But the real test wasn't how many people attended the launch. It was what happened after it.

For most of Clevrr AI's life, onboarding has been painfully manual. At one point, getting a brand completely set up could take us almost four days. Then the amazing engineering team brought it down to eight hours up until last month. In August, we brought it down to under five minutes.

And 20+ brands completed the entire Clevrr onboarding process themselves.

No demo. No implementation call. No one from our team sitting with them while they connected their accounts.

This is an important milestone for us because we've spent months building conviction that Clevrr AI can eventually scale through product rather than proportionally scaling implementation and sales teams. For the first time, we're getting meaningful evidence that it can.

India's festive calendar is ridiculous if you're a performance marketer, and as a D2C Brand the festive season is the biggest opportunity for making the most amount of revenue

So we built a simple New Tab Chrome extension. On every new tab, it shows the upcoming festivals, a live countdown to each one, and a to-do list to manage everything that needs to happen before the campaign goes live.

We thought it would be a useful little side tool. It crossed 200+ downloads in less than a week. And people kept using it. This is becoming an interesting distribution lesson for us.

Not every acquisition channel needs to say Book a Demo. Sometimes you build something genuinely useful for your ICP, give it away, and let that usefulness introduce people to your company.

We also launched something that might initially sound counterintuitive for an AI company. A playbook that helps people get better answers from ChatGPT and Claude.

The problem we noticed wasn't always the model. It was the question. You can give an AI enormous amounts of data and context, but if a performance marketer asks:

Why did my ROAS fall?

...the answer will often still be generic.

So we built a library of 100+ battle-tested D2C prompts covering the questions founders and performance marketers actually ask.

Users can take a prompt and paste it directly into the AI they already use. Why would Clevrr help people use horizontal AI products better? Because we want to build for a world where every performance marketer becomes AI-native.

The more sophisticated the user becomes, the clearer the gap between a general-purpose model and a system purpose-built to continuously understand their business becomes.

I also had the opportunity to speak at Women in Product India's Beyond Checkout: Rise of Agentic Commerce event.

The conversation was around a question we're thinking deeply about:

Are commerce brands actually ready for the agentic era?

I spoke about the festive season through the lens of performance marketing, how paid acquisition is changing, and what happens when AI moves beyond generating reports to actively diagnosing and helping execute decisions.

A lot of what I spoke about is exactly what we're trying to build at Clevrr AI.

And now for the other side of August.

This is the biggest one. We went into the last few months planning to raise a $1M pre-seed round for product and market expansion.

We had conversations. We had interest. We made progress. But we weren’t able to close it within the timeline we needed to.

And at our stage, there's a very meaningful difference between investor interest and money in the bank. Continuing to spend months pursuing the same round while our runway keeps shrinking isn't responsible.

So we've changed the plan. We're now raising a smaller ₹50L angel round.

The objective is straightforward: extend runway, capitalize on the PLG motion we've finally unlocked, move Clevrr AI towards break even, and return to the market for a larger institutional round later from a stronger position.

This wasn't Plan A. But the job isn't to stubbornly execute Plan A.

This was the hardest consequence of the situation above. We reduced the Clevrr AI team from seven people to five.

This wasn't a performance decision. It was a liquidity and cash-flow decision.

When runway becomes constrained, optimism can't be the basis on which you manage payroll. We had to reduce burn and give the company more time. There's no clever founder lesson we want to attach to this.

It sucked. These are people who helped us build Clevrr AI, and having to make that decision because of the company's financial position was painful.

We're now five people with significantly tighter ownership and a very clear mandate:

Make every rupee and every week count.

Here are the key metrics we’ll track consistently going forward:

There is an important difference between these numbers and some metrics we've historically reported in Insider. These are actual platform-level numbers visible inside Clevrr AI, rather than pipeline numbers or the broader scale represented by customers at different stages of implementation.

And there's another number we care deeply about this month:

That's why August feels particularly bittersweet.

After months of building, we finally have Shopify approval, Google approval, Meta approval, a publicly available product, five-minute onboarding, and early evidence that customers can get onto the platform without our team.

The product has arguably never been in a better position.

The company has arguably never had less room for error.

This month's Ask isn't a nice-to-have. We need help closing our ₹50L angel round.

Our runway has reached a critically low level, and extending it is currently the single most important priority for us as founders. We're particularly looking to speak with angel investors who understand or have operated across:

We're not raising this capital to spend another year figuring out whether there's a product here. We've spent the last several months doing that.

The product is public. The integrations are approved. Brands are paying. Brands are onboarding themselves. And we're finally in a position to test the PLG motion that we've spent months building toward.

This ₹50L gives us the time to turn those signals into a sustainable, profitable business.

If you're an angel investor yourself, or there's someone in your network we should speak to, a warm introduction could make a very real difference to us right now.

We're building Clevrr AI to help D2C brands unlock additional revenue without increasing their advertising budgets.

Every day, brands lose money to underperforming creatives, zombie campaigns, poor audience allocation, inventory mismatches, and dozens of hidden inefficiencies that only become visible when they show up in the P&L.

Clevrr identifies these revenue leaks before they become expensive mistakes and recommends exactly what to fix.

We've replicated the thinking process of an exceptional performance marketer into an AI system that continuously monitors your business, diagnoses problems, prioritizes opportunities, and helps your team make faster, more profitable decisions.

We’ve seen brands working with unlock upto 20% of additional revenue per week without scaling ads spend - that would’ve otherwise gone to vain by zombie campaigns, OOS inventory, or junk audience that only orders COD and get RTO’ed.

Thanks for reading as we build this in the open.

Talk soon,
Yuvraj & Raghav
Founders
Clevrr AI