Artificial intelligence generation company Boosted.ai announced this week the closing of a $15 million funding round. Part of the funding will go towards further developing its latest technology and expanding into the wealth management market.
Although not a household name to most financial advisors, Boosted.ai was launched in 2017 and is probably best known to asset and investment managers. It has offices in Toronto and New York, and the company says it currently serves more than 300 active clients managing more than $3 trillion in assets in its institutional and wealth management segments.
“We started with institutions, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds,” said Joshua Pantony, co-founder and CEO of Boosted.ai, in an interview with WealthManagement.com at the beginning of this year.
The latest funding includes funding from Fidelity Investments Canada ULC and Boosted.ai's existing institutional shareholders, which include Ten Coves Capital, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada and HarbourVest Partners.
According to a Boosted.ai spokesperson, this additional capital is an extension of the firm's Series B round and brings its total funding to $61 million.
As a startup, Boosted.ai began building its own machine learning algorithms for sophisticated users at hedge funds and institutions.
“Our users have used us for everything from generating ideas to analyzing stocks, portfolios and risk – truly making the entire investment process more efficient and streamlining and executing workflows on your behalf,” Pantony said. .
The company is now developing its own AI agent platform called Alpha, which is meant to be more autonomous than generative AI. It is intended to think for itself to a certain extent and act as an assistant to those who use it.
In other words, how Nvidia describes itAgent AI “uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex multi-step problems”.
Specifically, Boosted.ai envisions Alpha as an AI collaborator that can be trained to think like them and, in turn, monitor for things that might affect their portfolios or perform research and analysis .
“It will monitor everything that happens in the world and notify me of anything that might affect my wallet, and it can go to the next level and operate independently of the user,” Pantony said.
“We see the use case for the asset side more for customer communication; for example, we talk to a lot of RIAs that publish on a weekly basis what went right in the portfolio and why and what went wrong — we want to automate that for the advisor,” he said.
The platform can generate the newsletter, analysis and comments within it or generate a podcast script.
“And let's say the advisor wants commentary or a script using only hockey metaphors, no problem,” Pantony said.
He does not share the belief among some that human counselors will be replaced; much is still stored in the human brain, especially when it comes to the experiential and emotional aspects of work.
“A machine might know that McDonald's is coming out with a new hamburger, but it won't know what it tastes like; someone will still have to enjoy it – large amounts of text and analysis of it – people will no longer need to do that,” he said.
Hallucinations, which are misleading or inaccurate AI-generated results, remain a major concern among all types of firms using generative AI.
“We can't afford hallucinations, and our hallucination rate has to be very low,” Pantony said, adding that the company relies on using multiple large language models for the different types of processes the technology performs, including models specific for determining needs. to be fact-checked and for actual fact-checking. The company even relies on a dedicated LLM committee of engineers and experts to oversee those designs.
“Behind the scenes, we have many different models working together. Some are managed internally, others externally,” he said.
While Boosted.ai does not publish its pricing information, Pantony said it is determined on a customer-by-customer basis. He said he expects that for most wealth management firms, his company's technology will be considered a premium product, one that will most benefit large RIAs with large staffs, where improvements in efficiency offset the cost.