In Fall Quarter 2024, the UC Irvine ANTrepreneur Center launched their brand-new AI Innovation Course. The AI Innovation Course was designed to introduce students to the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academia, professional industries, and entrepreneurship. This project-based course challenged students to develop AI-driven business ideas, implement AI tools in real-world applications, and present their projects in a clear, impactful manner. The AI Innovation Course culminated in a Final Demo Day, where students showcased their projects for a chance to win prizes.
The inaugural AI Innovation Course was incredibly successful, with 224 students enrolling and actively participating throughout the nine-week course. To highlight some of the incredible student innovators who participated in the course and showcased their final projects at Demo Day, Ryan Foland, ANTrepreneur Center Director, invited these ANTrepreneurs for a series of illuminating interviews.
In this interview, Ryan sits down with UC Irvine students Leland Bartikofsky (Political Science) and Cristian Mendoza (Computer Science, Business Administration) to learn more about their final project Clera.
Ryan: Ahoy! Thank you both for meeting with me to talk about your financial advising startup Clera. Can you start us out by explaining what inspired you to create Clera?
Cristian: When I was a freshman in college, my uncle called me asking for investment advice. He was about 45 at the time with a career and a 401k, yet he felt like there was no one to turn to for help other than his 18-year-old nephew.
This was the first time I encountered a problem affecting millions: access to high-quality, personalized investment advice. This conversation with my uncle, and many similar conversations that followed, led my co-founder and me to think: “Why isn’t there a tool to solve this specific problem?” This is what set us on our path to create Clera.
Ryan: What problem does Clera solve?
Leland: Accessibility and cost are the largest pain points within the Investment Advisory industry. Advice is often deliberately too complex for most of us to understand, and advisors don’t always provide insight that aligns with your personal goals. Additionally, getting advice is expensive and largely reserved as a service for the super-wealthy.
These points are the most common complaints we’ve heard from those who use an advisor, have used one in the past, or have skipped out on seeking advice altogether. Clera breaks down these barriers of accessibility and cost by bringing personalized, unbiased, and digestible investment advice to the world for $15 a month.
Ryan: How does Clera’s AI compare to traditional financial advisors in terms of accuracy and reliability?
Cristian: Generally speaking, advisors are wrong a lot of the time. Over the last 20 years, only 6% of active investment managers have beaten the market’s performance (S&P Global, 2023). This number is alarmingly low, considering last year $543.9B was spent on investment advice in the U.S. alone (IBIS, 2025). This shows that traditional advisors are charging an arm and a leg just to let their clients down 94% of the time.
While these numbers are alarming, they’re not surprising. A traditional human advisor can only do so much work in a day and can never be right 100% of the time. Clera may not be right 100% of the time—but she can certainly be right more than 6% of the time. We’re certain of this because she and her team can work faster, longer, and on hundreds of tasks at once. This guarantees that Clera will always have better answers and more ideas than a traditional advisor.
Ryan: How does Clera use AI to provide personalized investment advice?
Leland: Clera starts by creating a personalized investment plan based on your unique situation. Clera then deploys her team of AI agents to monitor your portfolio 24/7 and is always ready to answer any questions you have.
Each member of her team is super skilled at one particular part of an investment advisor’s role, and they work together to bring you the most valuable results. Using Clera is like having a team of the best investment advisors in the world ready to help you along your journey to financial success.
Ryan: That sounds incredible, but it also seems very complicated. Did you face challenges while developing Clera? How did you overcome them?
Cristian: Managing investments and providing advice is definitely a complex process with a lot of moving parts. We also realized there was a lot of grey area in terms of the regulation and legality of an AI financial advisor. So working through how to create a safe product that could provide the full breadth of investment management services was a challenging process that required tedious work.
To overcome this, we had security at the forefront of our mind when building out Clera’s agent framework. Not only did we put extensive guardrails in place for the model, but we also hardwired in a human-in-the-loop mechanism that requires your confirmation before Clera executes any transaction on your behalf.
Ryan: Moving on to your participation in the AI Innovation Course, how did the Course help shape your idea and refine your AI-powered solution?
Leland: The AI Innovation Course was immensely helpful! It plunged us into the UCI startup community and surrounded us with smart and innovative people. The process of preparing Clera for Demo Day pushed us to build the framework for what Clera has become today, and the feedback we received at the Demo Day was instrumental in finalizing our product pitch for our YC application.
Ryan: Speaking of Demo Day, what was the Demo Day experience like for you, and what kind of feedback did you receive?
Leland: It was a phenomenal experience. Demo Day confirmed that the problem we saw within our families and friends was true for so many, from other students to professional judges.
We got two key pieces of feedback from the event, the first being that we needed to emphasize the security we have in place since we are dealing with sensitive data from users. Second, we learned we needed to expand our moat against our competitors. This piece of feedback ultimately led us to pivot from our original product to a brokerage-oriented platform.
Ryan: Thank you both for meeting with me and sharing your insights. To close this out, can you share your long-term vision for Clera and how you see it evolving in the future?
Cristian: Clera’s mission is to democratize access to financial advice by providing everyone with a world-class investment advisor that’s always there for them—delivering valuable insights at a fraction of the cost of traditional wealth managers. We envision a future where financial uncertainty becomes a thing of the past; where every person, regardless of wealth or background, navigates their financial journey with confidence and clarity. This isn’t just about building another fintech tool—it’s about fundamentally transforming how people interact with their money and achieve their dreams.
To realize this vision, we’re aggressively expanding Clera’s capabilities beyond simple advice, building an AI-powered ecosystem that will eventually render traditional financial advisors obsolete. The future of finance isn’t just accessible—it’s intelligent, personalized, and in your pocket.
Inspired by Leland’s and Cristian’s journey and interested in the other ideas coming out of the AI Innovation Course? Visit our News webpage to keep up with the latest interviews, professional insights, and student success stories.
Want help developing your business idea? Then visit the ANTrepreneur Center website to learn more about programming, speaker series, Micro-Internships, funding, and more. You can also learn more about the Center’s collaborations with Blackstone LaunchPad, Tech Coast Angels, Tech Coast Venture Network, OC Startup Council, and SoCal Celebrates Entrepreneurship. Keep up with the Center’s latest news by following them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.