Ricardo Pantaleon

Ricardo Pantaleon
Occupation	Entrepreneur, software executive
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Cleon

Ricardo Pantaleon is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cleon, a technology company that develops artificial intelligence agents for the hospitality industry. The company is a graduate of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch and is based in New York.

Career

Before founding Cleon, Pantaleon worked in corporate banking as an analyst at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). He subsequently served as a development strategist at Palantir Technologies, where his work involved strategic planning and product development within the security software sector.

Pantaleon co-founded Cleon alongside Rohan Gupta. The company builds AI agents designed specifically for hotels and resorts. Cleon's platform is intended to cover the full arc of the guest journey, from initial inquiries through post-checkout feedback. The AI agents are trained on a property's standard operating procedures and quality assurance standards, enabling them to engage guests in the hotel brand's voice and in multiple languages. The system is designed to recognize when human staff involvement is needed and escalate accordingly.

According to the company, Cleon also surfaces operational patterns and insights from guest interactions that hotel teams can act on. The platform is marketed to both single-property resorts and multi-property portfolios.

Cleon initially launched with a broader focus on AI agents for software implementations, where its technology was used to capture knowledge during planning and discovery phases, automate the generation of key artifacts and documentation, and assist with complex data migrations. The company subsequently refined its focus to the hospitality sector.