Technology entrepreneur Rudi Kesic has launched a new venture, ClearPath AI, in Birmingham.
Described as an AI-native operating system for legal and professional services, the startup claims to have won £1 million pre-seed backing from entrepreneurs and senior industry figures.
Organisations are already testing the platform, it says, with customer, integration and strategic partnership announcements expected soon.
ClearPath is targeting professional industries where complex work remains heavily dependent on people interpreting documents and data, communicating between organisations and manually progressing processes.
Its technology is designed to allow AI to understand the context of that work, undertake research and reasoning, perform defined tasks and determine what needs to happen next.
Kesic believes this represents a more fundamental shift than the current wave of AI assistants and productivity tools.
“Most business software was designed in a world where systems stored information and people performed the work,” he said.
“AI fundamentally changes that model. Software can increasingly understand what is happening, reason over the information available and participate in getting the work done.
“We didn’t start by asking how we could add AI to an existing product. We started with a blank sheet of paper and asked what the operating system for professional services should look like if artificial intelligence was part of the architecture from day one.
“That’s what we’ve built with ClearPathOS.”
ClearPath has also been designed to operate alongside existing business technology rather than requiring organisations to replace their core systems before adopting AI.
Kesic chose Birmingham as the commercial home for the company and plans to create more than 20 new roles in the UK, while its technology operation is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The founder grew up in Coventry and has spent much of his professional life working in Birmingham and across the region.
“I’ve spent more than 25 years building businesses, and after selling my last technology company I genuinely didn’t think I would start again,” Kesic said. “I thought that chapter of my life might be finished.
“But once I stepped away, I realised I still wanted to build. What has changed is what success means to me.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to create wealth through the businesses I’ve built. This time I want to create that opportunity for many more people — careers, responsibility, ownership and the chance to participate in the value they help create.
“I grew up in Coventry and I’ve worked in Birmingham for much of my life. This region gave me opportunities, and I want ClearPath to create opportunities here for the next generation.”
Kesic began his career as a lawyer before becoming a law firm managing partner and technology entrepreneur. Over more than 25 years, he has built and exited businesses across legal services and technology, most recently through the acquisition of his legal technology business by Munich-based private equity investor AURELIUS.
That experience has shaped both the technology behind ClearPath and Kesic’s decision to build another company.
“I’ve been through a number of technology cycles, but I don’t think I’ve seen an opportunity like this,” he said. “AI isn’t simply another feature or another generation of software. I think it changes what software is capable of being.
“The incumbents have scale, customers, mature products and years of industry knowledge. We have a different advantage: we’re building now, with AI as the starting point rather than something that has to be added later.”