Cura

The problem

Cura is building the portfolio operating system for AI-native VCs, helping early-stage funds aggregate everything happening across their portfolio and automate the workflows that come with it: KPI tracking, LP reporting, information requests, monitoring, and more.

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO and founder of Cura, came from an engineering and machine learning background and ran GTM at Yoodli for two and a half years.

Before Clarify, he ran his GTM out of HubSpot at Yoodli, and had built a mountain of custom code on top of it just to make it usable. That setup worked at Yoodli because Sharan had a full team and RevOps support behind him. But when he started Cura as a solo founder, he didn’t have the headcount or the five hours a week it took to maintain the systems he’d duct-taped together. He needed everything to work out of the box.

“I built a ton of customizations, a bunch of custom code running on our HubSpot instance, trying to make it AI-native,” Sharan says.

The flexibility was the point, but it was also the problem. Every process decision meant another settings page, another meeting about how a field should work, another thing to configure before he could get back to actually selling.

The deeper issue was where his attention went. As a solo seller and first-time founder, Sharan didn’t want to spend his limited selling time on data entry. He’d also tried using Markdown files and Claude to replace a CRM, but it backfired.

“I tried having AI do all the field entries for about three months, and I found myself struggling on sales calls because I didn’t remember context. I hadn’t taken the time to intuit what was going on,” he says.

He needed:

• A CRM with opinions already baked in, not one he had to configure from scratch
• Enough automation to kill the busywork, without losing his own grip on deal context
• One system that could double as a sales coach, since he had no sales team or mentor to learn from
• To stop paying for point tools that did one narrow thing each

The solution

To address the above, Sharan adopted Clarify.

Today, his approach with Clarify is less “automate everything” and more “automate the parts that don’t need my judgment.” He also uses Clarify Agents to keep his co-founder, Adam, up to date on his work in real time, so neither of them has to waste time on manual internal reporting.

1. Manual where it matters, automatic everywhere else

Sharan still writes his own deal summaries and next-step notes by hand, even though Clarify can fill these in autonomously, because that’s where he builds the intuition and strategic read he needs going into a call. Everything else (deal source, timeline, close dates, and the dozens of metadata fields a CRM needs to actually be useful) is filled in automatically by Clarify’s AI Fields and Agents.

“I’m saving a ton of time because there’s so much metadata I need in the CRM that I don’t actually have to touch anymore. It just fills in automatically,” he says.

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO & Founder

2. An always-on sales coach built on his own deal data

With no sales team and no mentor to lean on, Sharan uses Clarify as a stand-in for both. When he’s stuck on a deal, he asks it directly.

“I asked it to look at every deal I’d lost in the last six months and segment them by the metadata we had,” he says. “It came back with a detailed breakdown, and here’s an example of recent coaching: deals were dying because I never got in front of an actual buyer, just someone who’d circulate it internally.”

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO & Founder

3. Structure that replaces configuration, not just flexibility

Where HubSpot took meetings to decide how a process should be tracked, Clarify came with a working setup out of the box.

“There’s not a lot of innovation needed here. I just want to take over and do the stuff I need to do,” Sharan says. “With HubSpot, there were so many meetings wasted on process. With Clarify, everything standard is just there.” Adding the one custom field he did want took about 30 seconds, not the seven clicks through a buried settings page HubSpot required.

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO & Founder

4. One system to replace several

Clarify’s built-in enrichment and lead finder meant Sharan could drop tools he was paying for elsewhere in his stack, like Clay, without losing the workflows they covered.

Outcomes

Eliminated a standalone tool entirely

“I don’t use Clay anymore because I can just do it in Clarify,” Sharan says. That’s $180 a month he’s no longer spending (roughly $2,000 a year for a bootstrapped company), on top of Clarify credits he can now use elsewhere in the product.

Full dependence on a single system

Cura’s GTM now runs entirely out of Clarify. “If Clarify goes down and I have sales calls that day, I’m cooked,” Sharan says, not as a complaint, but as a measure of how central it’s become.

Support that doesn’t feel like support

Sharan can’t tell Clarify’s engineers, customer success, and support apart, and means that as a compliment.

“I don’t know who’s support, who’s an engineer, who’s customer success. Everyone at Clarify is incredibly supportive,” he says. “I’ll drop something in and within minutes someone’s looking at it.”

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO & Founder

Why Clarify worked where HubSpot didn’t

HubSpot wasn’t the villain. It gave Sharan the flexibility to build exactly what he wanted. But flexibility has a cost: every workflow has to be designed before it can be used, and a solo founder doesn’t have the time to be his own sales ops team.

Clarify’s opinionated defaults meant Sharan could stop thinking about how his CRM should work and start using it. Combined with AI Fields handling the metadata he never wanted to touch, and a data layer he could interrogate like a coach, Clarify became less a system of record and more a working partner in how Cura sells.

“I don’t know what it’s like to run this without Clarify,” Sharan says. “It’s the thing I open first.”

Sharan Jhangiani, CEO & Founder