Automating investment due diligence: A chat with Anton Otaner, CEO of Clarum

Anton Otaner is the Co-founder & CEO of Clarum. Before Clarum, he was a blockchain engineer at Mint focusing on scalable solutions for gated content. He also led mobile AR engineering at EPHAS, an Ericsson One startup, where he developed business applications for AR experiences. Anton enjoys difficult challenges, both intellectual and physical, and prioritizes helping customers achieve real business value.

What motivated you to launch your startup?

My co-founder, Tommy, and I both come from technology backgrounds and share a deep passion for finance, which naturally drew us to explore opportunities that bridge both fields. Clarum was inspired by the realization that the financial sector is rich in data, yet much of it remains unstructured and underutilized. Clarum leverages this vast pool of knowledge to significantly enhance the decision-making capabilities of financial firms.

To be specific, we knew that due diligence is a cumbersome, time-sensitive, and data-intensive task that has remained unchanged for a long time, making it an ideal area for Clarum’s technology.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building?

Two things stand out about Clarum. First, in the M&A world, due diligence is crucial. Analysts and associates know that being thorough during this stage can make or break a deal. But people have limits — there are only so many documents you can check or numbers you can verify in a day. With advancements in AI and computing, we can push past these limits (imagine looking through billions of data points, all interconnected, in a few minutes). Skipping or rushing due diligence has caused big problems in the past, so we’re making sure that doesn’t happen with our tools.

Second, the cost and time it takes to do due diligence can reduce the number of deals in the market. Usually, due diligence can consume a good portion of a deal’s costs and drag on for a long time depending on how big the deal is. This is a problem when things need to move quickly. By using AI to increase the speed of the diligence process while lowering costs, we can make the private capital markets more efficient.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

A significant challenge we’ve faced is maintaining high transparency through our software when conducting due diligence. It’s crucial that our users have a clear understanding of how we analyze and verify data. This means we constantly refine our communication tools within the software to ensure users can easily follow the process and trust the results.

Adapting our software to meet each client’s specific needs has also been challenging. Since due diligence requirements can vary a lot between organizations, our platform must be flexible. We work hard to create customizable software, ensuring it provides straightforward and useful insights for every deal.

What are your future plans for your startup?

Our main focus is on deepening the insights we offer to our users. We’re expanding our capabilities by integrating more data sources and leveraging historical data to provide advanced analytics. This will enable us to offer more comprehensive and predictive insights. A parallel goal of ours is to automate as much of the due diligence process as possible. These improvements will make the entire investment process quicker and more effective for our clients.

If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?

Always step back and ensure you’re focusing on what really drives your business forward. Don’t waste time on tasks that don’t contribute to your main goals. And value your customers highly. Go above and beyond for them and keep communication clear and open. This builds strong relationships which is essential for any successful business.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Anton Otaner:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonotaner/
• Twitter: https://x.com/AntonOtaner

Clarum:

• Website: https://clarum.ai
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clarum-ai
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/clarum_ai
• We’re hiring: https://clarum.ai/careers

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!