Long before startups, brothers Tadeo and Mateo Acosta-Rubio were working inside stores, learning the mechanics behind quick-service restaurants (QSRs) firsthand.
They were born in Venezuela and raised inside their family’s business, ChurroMania, now a 140+ location franchise across 10 countries.
“We were operating stores probably since before we could speak English, and then managing scores before we could drive,” Tadeo told Refresh Miami.
Over time, a pattern emerged. Operators – whether running five stores or fifty – were making key decisions without a clear, unified view of their data.
That realization became Clave, a Miami-based startup building an AI-powered operations platform for QSR franchise operators. The company announced that it has already raised about $1 million in pre-seed funding from firms including Bain Capital, Tetrad VC, Hustle Fund, Geek Ventures, and Untapped Capital.
“We grew up in franchise boardrooms and behind counters. We watched our family and other operators make million-dollar decisions based on gut instinct because their data was trapped in five different systems that didn’t talk to each other. We built Clave because we got tired of waiting for someone else to solve it,” Tadeo shared.
Today, Clave connects to tools like Toast, NCR, Square, Restaurant365, 7shifts, and Olo, pulling fragmented data into one place so operators can actually use it. The platform is already live with operators across brands like Jamba Juice, Capriotti’s, and Ben & Jerry’s.
Behind it is a five-person team based in Miami including Tadeo and Mateo, co-founder and CTO Carlos Leonardo Emanuele, and founding engineer Valentina Casteline. The three founders had already built and exited a music studio sharing platform called Stuvi.
“I think we’ve always had a vendetta against the startup ecosystem where founders are just playing a role in a big TAM-driven market,” Mateo said. “In our case, it came from a deep-rooted understanding that this is a real problem, and it needs to be solved.”
Early traction came in a scrappy way. Much of their initial outreach was simple LinkedIn messages, often framed as a student asking to learn.
“A lot of our early go to market was basically me LinkedIn DMing people, saying, ‘Hey, I’m a college student. I’d love to pick your brain about the space,’” asserted Mateo, who is currently a junior at Babson College. “And those conversations turned into, ‘Hey, can I try this?’”
Those conversations turned into pilots, and pilots into customers. It helped that they weren’t learning the industry from scratch.
“It’s been easy for us to go from an initial conversation to piloting with these stores because we speak their language,” Mateo said.
Miami has also played a role. The brothers first pitched Clave locally, including at eMerge Americas, gaining early support before they had a finished product.
“It really gave us the platform needed to launch off,” Tadeo said.
Looking ahead, their vision goes beyond dashboards. While Clave currently surfaces insights, the longer-term goal is to move toward systems that act and “eventually take action on your behalf,” as Tadeo described.
For now, the focus is straightforward: grow the team, deepen integrations, and expand across their network. From Miami to the world.
This story was updated to reflect a greater amount of pre-seed funding now raised.
Pictured at the top of this post: From left to right, Clave co-founders Carlos Leonardo Emanuele; and Tadeo and Mateo Acosta-Rubio; and founding engineer Valentina Casteline.
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