From Complex Systems to Smarter Investment Decisions: Mike Conover on Born in Silicon Valley
What do lungs, city streets and startup investing have in common? According to our CEO and Co-Founder, Mike Conover, more than you might think.
In the latest episode of Born in Silicon Valley, hosted by Match Relevant’s Jake Villarreal, Mike shares the story behind Brightwave: how a fascination with complex systems led to the creation of an AI-powered diligence platform redefining how investment professionals work.
Watch the full episode below.
Rethinking How We Understand Information at Scale
Mike Conover’s journey to founding Brightwave began with a lifelong curiosity about the hidden systems that shape the world: how lungs and trees share fractal structures, how cities resemble vascular networks and how information spreads like a living organism through communication platforms.
“I think my whole life I have had a really clear sense that the world is governed by systems that are more complex than we can apprehend in our day-to-day lives.”
That early fascination evolved into a PhD in complexity science, and eventually into work that used data to explain and predict human behavior at scale. While working at LinkedIn, Conover’s team used 500 million job transitions to forecast market movements. At Databricks, he helped launch Dolly, one of the first open-source language models that exhibited ChatGPT-like behavior.
But it was the rise of transformer-based models, particularly those that could process large documents all at once, that unlocked a new possibility. “Language models don’t read left to right,” he shared. “They see the totality of a passage simultaneously… and that is so different from how humans interact with the world.”
With that shift, Conover realized that models could be built not just to understand language, but to help professionals reason across vast volumes of information, faster and more consistently than ever before.
That idea became the foundation for Brightwave: a platform designed to uncover meaningful patterns in data rooms, filings, contracts and disclosures that would otherwise be too large and unstructured for a human team to process in full.
Solving the Real Bottleneck in Investment Research
Investment research has always been defined by limits: of time, of attention and of how much any one person can absorb. The traditional model of research has long relied on reading, highlighting, summarizing and assembling insights into slide decks or memos. Even with powerful tools to help, the bottleneck has always been human capacity.
But with language models that can process 100+ pages of text at once and identify patterns across entire data rooms, the game is changing. Instead of throwing more analysts at the problem, Brightwave uses AI to help analysts work more efficiently by reviewing every page of every document and delivering structured, decision-ready analysis.
“We use language models to read the entirety of every document, for every analysis we perform... That allows us to provide guarantees around comprehensiveness and accuracy that are just really hard to touch.”
And unlike chat-based AI products that simulate conversations, Brightwave’s platform is purpose-built for financial workflows. With Brightwave, analysts can define and save customized research Blueprints for the types of analysis they perform regularly. Brightwave then applies these templates to each deal and delivers detailed, source-cited reports that can be reused, refined and shared across the team.
That shift matters. It means less prompting, less copy-pasting and more time spent doing what humans do best: interpreting signals, applying judgment and making strategic decisions.
As financial institutions adapt to growing workloads, tighter deal timelines and escalating expectations for rigor, tools like Brightwave will become indispensable; not because they replace human analysts, but because they let people focus on the parts that matter most: testing assumptions, asking sharper questions and surfacing the risks others miss.
Ready to Rethink Your Research Stack?
Whether you're navigating a data room on urgent timelines or preparing for earnings season, Brightwave delivers structured, source-verified insights that scale with your workflow.
Interested in seeing Brightwave in action? Request a trial or reach out to our team to learn how we support private market investors and public equity teams alike.
