Exclusive: AI financial research startup Brightwave raises $6M
Brightwave, which is building an AI-powered research assistant for financial analysis, raised $6 million in seed funding, founder Mike Conover tells Axios exclusively.
Why it matters: The company’s proprietary technology brings together information from a wide range of sources to provide detailed financial analysis to RIAs and hedge funds.
Context: Before founding Brightwave, Conover built Databricks’ open-source large language model (LLM) Dolly.
- His co-founder, Brandon Kotara, was formerly the CTO of cloud-based derivatives exchange and clearing house LedgerX.
How it works: Brightwave enables users to obtain detailed financial reports and analyses by typing in a query into its platform.
- The system provides a high-level executive summary, a bulleted list of relevant points, and links to underlying data sources and documents individual details are drawn from.
- “Brightwave reports are living documents that you can interact with … and get very granular details on demand on any finding or insight that catches your attention,” CEO Mike Conover says.
Behind the scenes: Data sources include breaking news, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, sell-side research, market data, and long-tail material from the public internet.
- “Drawing connections between… research findings is extremely time-consuming and labor intensive, and there’s a risk of missing something,” Conover says.
- “From a working memory standpoint, these models eclipse what a person is able to keep in mind simultaneously,” he adds.
State of play: While operating in stealth, the company signed up customers with assets under management totaling more than $120 billion. These clients ranged from owner-operated RIAs to $20 billion crossover hedge funds.
- Investment research teams leverage Brightwave to analyze specific sectors and equities, perform due diligence on private market opportunities, and develop investment theses.
- Meanwhile, wealth managers use Brightwave to create insightful market commentary on topics that drive buying decisions.
Zoom in: Decibel Partners led the seed round and was joined by Point72 Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, and angels from companies such as OpenAI, Databricks, Uber and LinkedIn.