SERIES SEED · OPEN·$2.4M ARR · 3 OF 12 COHORT FILLED
The decision substrate
for 18,300 mid-market
discrete manufacturers.
Across Rootstock, Microsoft BC, NetSuite and Epicor — the four ERPs we connect to first — there are roughly eighteen thousand $50M–$250M discrete manufacturers in our primary geography. Every board is asking them the same question: what’s our AI plan? CLBA is the canonical layer that has to exist before any of them can answer. We’re picking twelve to build it with.
Decisions · this week
FY26 · Q2
Margin erosion
$312K
across 4 product lines · +$84K vs. last week
Delivery exposure
11 orders
commit dates at risk · WC-12, WC-17
Routing stale
36
14 on critical BOMs · 547d max
Recoverable margin
$1.14M
annualized · price-to-value 9.3×
§ 01The thesisIntelligence Above ERP™
Three questions every manufacturing exec asks weekly. Your ERP can’t answer any of them.
ERPs were built to record transactions, not to weigh them. The data is there — routing times, burden pools, supplier lead-time drift, quote-to-job linkage — but the answer requires reconciling it across systems, scoring its confidence, and re-costing on actuals. That’s not a query. It’s a decision.
QUESTION 01
“Will this quote actually make money?”
The standard cost on the line is two years old. The work-center burden was re-pooled in January. The Ti-6Al-4V rate was last set before the Feb surcharge.
CLBA · re-costs on trailing-60d actuals · 19.1% true vs. 32.4% standard
QUESTION 02
“Can we still hit the May 22 commit?”
WC-12 routing standard is 547 days stale. The new spindle runs 24% slower. MRP says the week is fine; the floor is already at 130% of nominal.
CLBA · projects load on actuals · flags 11 commits at risk
QUESTION 03
“Where is margin actually leaking?”
Quoted-vs-close variance is 9.8% across FY26-Q1. The driver is one routing record, one overhead pool, one supplier — but the report won’t tell you that.
CLBA · root-causes erosion to 7 drivers · $312K this week
§ 02 · The cohort
Twelve manufacturers. Three filled.
We’re picking customers, not pricing them. Design partners get founder-direct access, weekly product review, the audit at cost, and locked-in pricing through 2027.
Cohort status · live
Meridian Precision
Atlas Forge Co.
Brightline Aero
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
OPEN
↑ DESIGN PARTNER SLOTS · H1 2026 · CLOSES JUL 1
Who fits
- Industry
- Discrete manufacturing — aerospace, industrial machining, medical devices, defense
- Revenue
- $50M – $1B annual revenue · 1+ plants
- ERP
- Rootstock, NetSuite, D365 BC, or Epicor Kinetic in production
- Sponsor
- CFO, COO or CRO willing to spend 2 hrs / week for 8 weeks
- Partner
- An existing VAR relationship — or we’ll introduce one
§ 03Unit economics$25K → $250K
The audit is the land.
Subscription is the expand.
We sell a $25,000 AI Readiness Audit as the entry artifact. 68% of audits convert to a CLBA subscription — averaging $250K ACV in year one, growing to $400K+ as agent count expands. The audit pays for itself in the first month of subscription.
LAND
$25K · 5-day audit
Fixed-fee, co-delivered with a VAR. 30% margin to the partner. 100% of fee credits against year-one subscription if the customer converts.
CAC ≈ $0 · paid CAC by design
EXPAND
$250K · year-one ACV
Three decision agents (Quote · Capacity · Margin) at $80K each, plus the canonical layer at $50K. Annual contract, paid quarterly, 25% recurring margin to the VAR.
68% audit → ACV · 14-day median cycle
DEEPEN
$400K+ · year-three NRR
Fourth and fifth agents (Cash, Audit-ready Close), MCP server licensing, cross-tenant veracity sweeps. Net retention modelled at 145%; gross at 96%.
Negative churn within 18 months
§ 04The moatWhy CLBA, not the ERP
What ERPs ship next
A copilot in a window. Same data, same errors.
- ×Single-tenant. Each customer relearns the same data quality lessons.
- ×No cross-ERP canonical layer. Locked to one vendor’s schema.
- ×No confidence scoring on source values. No audit trail on agent output.
- ×Sold by ERP sales motion — six months to procurement.
CLBA’s moat
One canonical layer. N tenants compounding.
- →Cross-tenant veracity sweeps: a finding in one customer becomes a check across all of them. Compounds with every audit.
- →Canonical schema spans Rootstock today; NetSuite, BC, Epicor, SAP, Acumatica next. ERP-neutral by construction.
- →Veracity pipeline + signed-decision artifacts make CLBA the system of record for “what we decided,” not just “what happened.”
- →Audit-led GTM: $25K artifact, 5 days, paid CAC. We never carry unpaid pipeline.
§ 05 · Roadmap
Closed by invitation — opening in stages.
We’ve chosen to grow slowly. Twelve design partners give us depth on the canonical model, the cross-customer sweep, and the audit ritual — before we open self-serve.
Q4 2025 · shipped
Veracity pipeline · Rootstock
Rootstock connector live with a charter customer. Canonical model frozen at 151 tables across 16 domains.
SHIPPEDH1 2026 · open now
Design partner cohort
12 manufacturers · audit-led onboarding · weekly product review · founder-direct access.
3 / 12 FILLEDQ3 2026
NetSuite + D365 BC
Cohort 1 candidates ship: NetSuite + Business Central connectors land for the first matched charter customers. VAR self-service portal.
PLANNED2027
Cross-customer sweep
Anonymized peer benchmarks. Epicor (Cohort 2) and SAP (enterprise track) connectors. Public canonical schema.
PLANNED§ 06 · Investor brief
Request the investor brief.
We’re talking with a small set of seed funds and operator angels with manufacturing or vertical-SaaS experience. Tell us about your fund or your check, and we’ll send the deck, the cohort traction memo, and a 30-minute slot.
Already met? Drop your email — we’ll send the next quarterly investor update with cohort progress, ARR, and pipeline detail.
SEED · LED BY OPERATOR-ANGELS
SERIES A · TARGETED Q4 2026
SERIES A · TARGETED Q4 2026