Brightwave, an AI-powered financial research assistant, has raised $6 million in seed funding.
Decibel Partners led the round, which also received backing from Point72 Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and angel investors, including executives from OpenAI, Databricks, Uber and LinkedIn.
Brightwave claims its current client base includes firms with over $120 billion in assets under management.
Based in New York and Boulder, Colo., Brightwave was co-founded by Brandon Kotara and Mike Conover earlier this year. Kotara is the former CTO of LedgerX, a federally regulated exchange and clearinghouse. Conover, who serves as CEO, previously founded and led open source LLM engineering at Databricks, where he created Dolly, an open source AI model.
Conover said Brightwave trains its models in combination with other commercial AI providers. Training data includes breaking news, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, sell-side research and market data.
“We believe the conversation is not enough about finance,” Conover said. “Brightwave acts as a thought partner. It controls their work and allows professionals to quickly get up to speed in new sectors, but also to go extremely deep in the topics they know best.”
With the rise of generative AI, some similar platforms for advisors have appeared recently. For example, Portrait analysisan AI generative research platform for investment analysts, can answer the questions or perform tasks typically required of a junior analyst.
Rather than just a question-and-answer format, Conover said Brightwave's reports are “living documents.” At the top is an executive summary, followed by an additional long-form narrative containing quantitative details and color commentary. Brightwave also contains sentence-level attribution, which links back to the primary source. Additional questions can then be asked, allowing for deeper analysis of each part of the report.
“Brightwave generates questions that would be natural next steps,” he said. “We can answer them in the chat panel, as well as issue additional research reports that would consult the public Internet to deepen and improve your understanding of the topic at hand.”
Brightwave currently has six employees. Conover said the company will use the seed funding to expand operations and invest in additional data resources.
“We see this as a generational opportunity,” he said. “These are tools that expand people's cognitive abilities. … It will increase our ability to do the thing that is the most human part of the job.”
Conover declined to provide information about Brightwave's pricing.