About us
Clearspeed began with a Marine who refused to accept that vetting failures were inevitable
About us
Clearspeed began with a Marine who refused to accept that vetting failures were inevitable
In Iraq, Marine officer Alex Martin's close friend was killed on a joint patrol. The shooter was an infiltrator, embedded in their own formation, vetted and cleared to operate alongside coalition forces with the best tools and systems available at the time. The process said yes. And none of it was enough.
Martin came home obsessed with one question: how did the process clear someone who never should have been there? The traditional playbook looked backward at records, patterns, and history. Where data was missing, blind spots formed. There was no way to fill them in time.
So he set out to build a better way to assess risk and build trust at the moment of decision.
Martin came home obsessed with one question: how did the process clear someone who never should have been there? The traditional playbook looked backward at records, patterns, and history. Where data was missing, blind spots formed. There was no way to fill them in time.
So he set out to build a better way to assess risk and build trust at the moment of decision.
The key to trust wasn't in any database
Martin had plenty of data. What no database could give him was a way to verify the person in the moment, at the point of decision.
He partnered with Stanford professor Charles Holloway to find a different kind of answer. Past the records. Past the profiles. Past everything a database could hold. What they found was in the voice. Not in what people said, but the changes that occur when someone answers a question where something is at stake. That signal became the foundation for Clearspeed.
First deployed where the stakes don't get higher
Clearspeed’s first major defense client was U.S. Special Operations Command. In 2018, it screened 715 Afghan commando recruits in under 20 hours. A process that had previously taken months.
General David Petraeus, an early investor, called it “outsized value for personnel vetting, insider threat mitigation, and enterprise security.” If it worked for SOCOM, everything else was within reach.
>97%
Accuracy rate
SOCOM
>97%
Accuracy rate
SOCOM
60+
Languages across 37 countries
60+
Languages across 37 countries
Series D
$110M total investment raised
Series D
$110M total investment raised
Most people are trustworthy. We started there.
Risk tools have long been built on the same idea: treat everyone as a potential threat and search for a reason to reject them. They find what they are built to find. Meanwhile, the people who did everything right wait anyway.
Clearspeed starts from a different belief: that most people are genuine. So it fast-tracks them, and gives the few who warrant a closer look a path through the regular process. The result is faster, fairer, and objective by design.
Trust is the mission
Clearspeed is built for institutions that cannot afford to get trust decisions wrong. Our mission is to bridge the gap between risk assessment and the decision to trust, as AI makes trusted signals harder to find and false ones easier to scale.
"Trust is a battle space. It always has been. The ability to rapidly assess who can be trusted is a strategic advantage."
Alex Martin
CEO and co-founder, Clearspeed
Who we areThe Clearspeed team brings experience from defense, intelligence, risk, technology, and enterprise operations. Backgrounds shaped by
decisions made under pressure.
Alex Martin
CEO & Co-Founder
Francesco Crippa
Chief Technology Officer
John Zaal
Chief Operations Officer
Jules Ehrlich
Chief Product & Strategy Officer
