Claire Mao is Co-Founder of Instance, a Y Combinator-backed AI data analyst platform that empowers every team member to query business data in plain English without writing SQL.

Claire studied Mathematics and Computer Science at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing, and previously interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where she contributed to planetary atmosphere research.

Claire co-built Instance through Y Combinator's program at MIT alongside co-founder Lucy Cai, bringing a rare blend of deep technical rigor and applied AI product thinking to the data analytics space.

Instance enables any team member to ask natural language questions like which features are most used by paying customers and receive accurate answers pulled directly from their database in seconds, eliminating engineering bottlenecks.

Instance is opening early access for startups and data-driven teams, targeting the widespread pain point of non-technical operators waiting on engineers to write SQL or manually copying data into AI tools.