Cloneable, a Raleigh, North Carolina startup that uses AI to shadow human experts and replicate their specialized workflows as autonomous agents, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Congruent Ventures led the round, with participation from First In, Overline, Bull City Venture Partners, and St. Elmo Venture Capital (the investment arm of customer Texas Area Telecom), bringing total capital raised to $5.35 million since the company’s 2023 founding, according to Crunchbase News.
The Knowledge Crisis in Heavy Industry
The company targets a specific demographic problem. “For every young worker entering the energy workforce, 2.4 experienced ones are walking out the door toward retirement. And it’s happening right as energy demand is set to double by 2050,” CEO Lia Reich told Crunchbase News.
The founding team, Lia Reich, Tyler Collins, and Patrick Lohman, were previously founding employees at drone company PrecisionHawk. The idea for Cloneable came in 2019, when wildfires in California sent their team to inspect critical infrastructure. They deployed 150 drone pilots to survey thousands of miles of transmission lines, but reviewing the data bottlenecked on a handful of experts who knew what to look for. Reich visited a PG&E command center and saw hundreds of workers manually scrubbing through footage while only a few specialists could identify issues.
How Expert Cloning Works
Unlike generic AI that requires clean data and coding, Cloneable’s platform “shadows” experts in real time. The AI watches an expert perform a workflow, captures audio and documentation, then converts that contextual experience into an agent capable of executing the same task independently.
The performance claims are specific. A structural calculation for replacing, upgrading, or installing 25 utility poles typically takes a human engineer eight hours. Cloneable says its agent completes the same task in under two minutes. A single engineer can process roughly 4,500 to 5,500 poles per year before hitting a capacity ceiling, according to Reich. The agent runs at 2 million to 3 million poles annually.
“For a mid-size engineering firm with five to 10 people spending half their time on this work, that’s $115,000 to $312,000 a year in labor that’s not being redirected to higher-value work,” Reich told Crunchbase News.
Customers and Traction
Cloneable launched its first product, Cloneable Field, for automated infrastructure inspection in February 2025. The company claims 100x ARR growth between February and the end of 2025. Current customers include American Electric Power, Southern California Edison, Burns & McDonnell, TRC, and Sigma, as well as Perdue, which is expanding the expert cloning model to livestock and food supply operations, according to Crunchbase News.
The new funding will support expansion into public utilities, vegetation management, construction, rail, mining, agriculture, and manufacturing. Alongside the fundraise, Cloneable is launching a new agentic product that codifies expert knowledge and deploys it as scalable AI agents across these sectors.
The Bet on Domain-Specific Agents
Most agentic AI funding has gone to general-purpose platforms, coding assistants, and enterprise workflow tools. Cloneable is betting that the largest ROI for autonomous agents sits in industries where expertise is scarce, workflows are physical, and generic foundation models lack the domain knowledge to be useful. The 100x ARR growth claim, if accurate, suggests that thesis is landing with buyers. The open question is whether “expert cloning” scales beyond the utility pole use case into the broader set of infrastructure workflows the company is targeting with this round.