Claudio Fuentes
Technical founder who builds and ships. Deep expertise in AI products, enterprise sales, and scaling teams from zero.
Background
Claudio Fuentes Salinas, born in Mexico City in the 1990s. Moved to South Florida at 14 when my family relocated during the 2008 financial crisis. My father sold everything we owned in Mexico. Within two years, we'd lost it all — at the lowest point, we lived in a motel for months while my mom asked churches for food.
That experience woke something up in me. I realized that if I wanted things in life, I'd have to go out and get them myself. Spent six years in New York and four in San Francisco building companies. Returned to NYC in 2025 to scale Comp AI.
Native Spanish and English speaker.
First Business: Music
My father was an internationally renowned vocalist. Started on piano, guitar, and drums early. At 14, taught myself to produce electronic music as “Klaud.”
At 16, started hustling clubs in Miami — selling tickets, building leverage, then negotiating my way onto stage. Built a team around me: manager, marketer, designers. Scaled to 20,000+ fans and signed to Bash Records at 18.
That leverage got me to Ultra Music Festival (2013–2014), headlining tours in Malaysia, clubs in Ibiza, and opening for Steve Angello (Swedish House Mafia), Sander Van Doorn, and Disco Fries. Signed tracks to EMPO (Universal Music) and Disco Fries' label, with an offer from Armada (Armin van Buuren's label). This was my first lesson in building something from zero — and it's what pushed me toward tech.
Education
Associate's Degree in Music Composition from Miami Dade College. Studied Computer Information Systems at Baruch College (Zicklin School of Business) before leaving to build companies. Certificate in Disruptive Strategy from Harvard Business School Online (2020).
Technical
Self-taught full-stack developer since 2017. Web: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Nest.js, Tailwind. Backend: Python, Node.js. Mobile: React Native, Flutter, Swift.
Deployed to Vercel, AWS, and GCP. Comfortable with serverless, traditional server, and event-driven architectures. Built every product I've founded from the first commit.
Enterprise Experience
WeWork (2016)
Growth Associate during the hyper-growth phase. Focused on operational scaling and market expansion.
AskNed (2017–2018)
Co-founder. Built an AI-powered analytics engine that connected to Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and Shopify. Closed enterprise deals with NBCUniversal and Lionsgate. Left to join Pypestream for a stronger product opportunity.
Pypestream (2019–2022)
Senior Product Manager leading AI product development. Owned the self-serve AI studio, visual flow designer, NLP capabilities, and analytics platform. The platform handled 50M+ customer interactions monthly.
Directly impacted enterprise clients including Shell, Chase, Procter & Gamble, HBO Max, Royal Caribbean, and Gillette. Supported sales cycles for top accounts and presented the product to potential acquirers during M&A conversations.
Led cross-functional product teams of 12+ engineers and designers.
Elise AI (2025)
Staff Software Engineer building healthcare AI voice products. Left to co-found Comp AI — couldn't sit out the generative AI wave as anything other than a founder.
Founder
Comp AI (2025–present)
Co-founder & COO. Built the initial product, now leading a 15-person team. AI-powered compliance automation for startups on the path to becoming unicorns. SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR — faster, with AI handling the backend processes.
$3M ARR in under 12 months. 15-person team across SF and NYC. Raised $2.6M pre-seed co-led by Grand Ventures and OSS Capital. Angels include David Cramer (Sentry) — who backed me again after Leap AI — and Ben Tossell (Ben's Bites).
Integrates with 100+ tools. 3,500+ companies in pre-launch testing. First customers saved 2,500+ hours on manual compliance work. Part of Vercel's Spring '25 OSS initiative.
Leap AI (2023–2024)
Co-founder & CEO. Wrote the initial codebase and scaled the engineering team. No-code platform for AI workflows. Spun out from Founders Inc. after joining as studio founder, working with mentors Hubert Thieblot (Curse → Twitch) and Furqan Rydhan (AppLovin, Bebo → Amazon).
Scaled to $1M ARR and 1M+ users in 18 months. Raised $1.4M seed led by Founders Inc., with David Cramer (Sentry), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), and executives from Google and AngelList. Clients included Heineken, Inflection, and Live Nation. After two years, we couldn't find deeper product-market fit and made the decision to wind down.
Noonshot (2022–2023)
Co-founder. Solo-built the platform — no-code tools for digital collectibles. Scaled to 120,000+ monthly active users. Raised $160K but ran out of runway as the market shifted.
Approach
I'm a generalist who goes deep. Technical enough to build and ship product, commercial enough to close enterprise deals. I care about craft and moving fast without sacrificing quality. Success is consistency over time — there's nothing else to it.
Strong believer in in-person work. All Comp AI employees work five days a week from the NYC office. One morning, a teammate walked up and said “What if we build an AI agent for customer support?” Twenty minutes later, we had a working prototype that cut support requests by 95%. That kind of innovation doesn't happen over Slack.
Podcast
Documenting the Comp AI journey on Vibe Scaling. Three co-founders building in public.
