Brightwave: AI-Based Financial Research Assistant Company Raises $6 Million

Brightwave, an AI-powered research assistant that generates insightful and trustworthy financial analysis on any subject, today announced $6 million in seed funding. This funding round was led by Decibel Partners, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, and angel investors including executives from OpenAI, Databricks, Uber, and LinkedIn.

Launched by engineers with deep knowledge in AI and finance infrastructure, the company’s co-founders Mike Conover and Brandon Kotara have over 20 years of combined experience building AI and machine learning products.

Brightwave builds and trains proprietary AI systems that synthesize insightful analysis from a collection of hundreds of millions of documents, including breaking news, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, sell-side research, market data, enterprise knowledge base content, and high-signal, long-tail material from the public internet. And in only four months, Brightwave’s customer base has grown to include diverse funds, firms and strategies with assets under management totaling more than $120 billion, ranging from owner-operated RIA’s to $20 billion crossover hedge funds whose trades move global markets.

Brightwave speeds up core information processing workflows and increases the depth/quality of thought financial professionals can bring to bear on any subject. And investment research teams at some of the world’s largest asset managers are using Brightwave to understand new sectors rapidly, go deep on specific equities, discover diligence opportunities in private markets, and develop investment theses based on fact patterns synthesized across vast bodies of content. Plus, wealth management customers use Brightwave to grow AUM and provide exceptional client experiences deeply prepared on the topics that drive buying decisions and create insightful market commentary at scale.

Before founding Brightwave, co-founder and CEO Mike Conover established and led open-source language model engineering efforts at Databricks, where he was the co-creator of Databricks Dolly. Brandon Kotara is the former CTO of LedgerX, a federally regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse that matches and clears trades for some of the largest institutional asset managers in the world.

Brightwave’s team has decades of combined experience in AI/ML, semantic search, knowledge graph construction, and operating enterprise-grade systems for finance. The company’s founding team includes NeurIPS-published research engineers with deep expertise in language model design and development alongside talent from Meta and Goldman Sachs.

KEY QUOTES:

“With Brightwave, we are creating a system that can reason over bodies of information that exceed the limits of human cognition. Artificial intelligence is a force multiplier for financial professionals, and Brightwave is explicitly designed to act as a partner in thought. In addition to fundamental technical advances, we’ve taken a unique approach to product that enables Brightwave users to interactively direct the attention of an AI assistant, allowing them to blend domain expertise with the capabilities of a system that can process information hundreds of times faster and more comprehensively than any person.”

‍– Mike Conover, Co-Founder and CEO of Brightwave

“We believe that Brightwave’s approach could represent a significant leap forward for financial research. The team has continuously impressed us with their deep domain expertise and ability to execute on complex AI systems. New applications for Brightwave across the financial services industry keep emerging, a testament to the platform’s versatility and timeliness of the product.”

‍– Sugam Sarin, Partner at Point72 Ventures.

“Most firms in this market don’t have the capacity to have large in-house research teams, and often struggle to keep up with everything happening in the markets in a thoughtful way. Traditional software hasn’t filled this gap, as it lacks the flexibility to serve the diverse range of industry players effectively. Brightwave has brought together top AI talent to build one of the best products I’ve used in my career. The ability to have an on-demand expert who can help me think through different markets at different levels of granularity is something that wouldn’t have been possible before. These capabilities are a testament to the uniqueness of Brightwave’s approach, far surpassing other AI solutions we’ve seen promoted in the market.”

‍– Alessio Fanelli, Partner at Decibel