Brightwave CEO Mike Conover Talks Vision and Innovation With NYSE TV

At this year’s Money20/20, we were thrilled that Brightwave made headlines for our Series A funding announcement and rapid growth in the market. Our CEO and Founder, Mike Conover, sat down with NYSE TV’s Trinity Chavez for a one-on-one interview to share a bit about our platform. In the conversation, Conover shared his insights on Brightwave’s groundbreaking technology, its positive impact on financial professionals and his broader vision for the future of investment research.

As the Lead Anchor for the New York Stock Exchange, Trinity Chavez hosts Taking Stock with Trinity Chavez, a show that goes beyond the numbers to explore the stories behind financial innovation. Through candid conversations with entrepreneurs, executives and investors, Chavez uncovers how groundbreaking ideas and emerging technologies are reshaping industries.

Watch the full interview with NYSE TV now:

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Solving Complexity in Financial Research

The investment world runs on data, but the sheer volume and complexity of information often exceed what humans can process effectively. For decades, analysts have relied on manual processes to comb through thousands of pages of documents, filings and analyses — an often daunting and time-consuming task. Brightwave offers a transformative alternative. 

“Think about the amount of work and human effort that goes into trawling through earnings call transcripts or SEC filings,” Conover explained. “You throw young investment professionals into the meat grinder, and they work these hundred-hour weeks. It is extremely meticulous work that requires a high level of attention to detail, but it’s very, very high volume. And it is not clear that that’s the best possible use of human talent.”

Brightwave’s AI-powered platform is designed to take on this heavy lifting. By synthesizing insights across millions of documents, it empowers investment professionals to shift their focus from labor-intensive data gathering to high-value strategic thinking. 

“If you think about the number of factors that are relevant to an investment decision, it exceeds the limits of a person’s ability to keep it in mind simultaneously,” Conover said. “We see an opportunity with language models to create a technology that allows a person to connect the dots across millions of documents and see a story that nobody else has noticed in order to identify a mispriced asset.”

A Team of Experts Tackling the Toughest Challenges

Brightwave’s foundation is built on deep expertise in both finance and technology. 

“We have an incredible engineering team,” Conover said. “For myself, I established and led the language model engineering practice at Databricks. It created the first language model to demonstrate that open-source technologies could exhibit the kinds of behaviors we’ve come to expect from ChatGPT.”

Co-founder Brandon Kotara brings equally impressive credentials. “My co-founder is the former CTO of a federally regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, and his first deep learning patent was filed in 2018. We’ve got engineers from Meta and Instagram, award-winning research engineers and a commercial team from UBS, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. It’s a stacked bench, and it has allowed us to execute on very, very difficult technical problems.”

Changing the Way Financial Professionals Work

During the interview, Conover compared Brightwave’s impact to another historical turning point in finance: the introduction of computational spreadsheets in the 1970s.

“If you were to say to an accountant in 1978, ‘What’s your job?’ They would say, ‘Well, I run the numbers. I do the math. It’s cognitively demanding. It’s important to the business. It’s very time-consuming,’” Conover said. “Now nobody wants that work.”

Brightwave is driving a similar generational shift in investment research. By automating the rote tasks of data aggregation and review, the platform liberates financial professionals to focus on creativity, judgment and high-impact decision-making.

A Year of Momentum and Growth

The conversation also touched on Brightwave’s recent $15 million Series A funding, announced during Money20/20. “We have announced a $15 million Series A, preempted by Decibel Partners, one of our seed stage investors, and including participation from OMERS Ventures,” Conover said. “This brings our total funding in the past 17 months to $21 million.”

Brightwave’s growth has been remarkable. “We’ve quadrupled our revenues since our seed announcement in June or July,” Conover noted. The new funding will allow Brightwave to expand its team, secure critical data assets and build partnerships that will allow Brightwave to become the definitive platform for understanding the structure of the global economy.

By empowering analysts to focus on what they do best and delivering unprecedented insights through AI, Brightwave is paving the way for a new era of efficiency, creativity and confidence in investing. Contact us today to learn more.