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 that its current customer 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 derivatives exchange and clearinghouse. Conover, who serves as CEO, previously established 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 that chat is not enough for finance,” said Conover. “Brightwave acts as a partner in thought. It checks its work and allows professionals to get up to speed quickly on new sectors, but also go extremely deep on the topics they know best.”
With the rise of generative AI, several similar platforms for advisors have emerged recently. For example, Portrait Analytics, a generative AI research platform for investment analysts, can answer questions or perform the tasks typically asked of a junior analyst.
Instead of simply a question-and-answer format, Conover said Brightwave reports are “living documents.” At the top is an executive summary, followed by an additional long-form narrative containing quantitative detail and color commentary. Brightwave also features sentence-level attribution, which connects back to the primary source. Additional queries may then be posed, allowing for deeper analysis of any part of the report.
“Brightwave generates questions that would be natural next steps,” he said. “We can answer those in the chat panel as well as firing off additional research reports that would consult the public internet to deepen and refine your understanding of the topic at hand.”
Brightwave currently has six employees. Conover said the company would use the seed funding to expand operations and invest in additional data sources.
“We see this as a generational opportunity,” he said. “These are tools that expand the cognitive capabilities of humans. … It’s going to increase our ability to do the thing that is the most human part of the work.”
Conover declined to provide information related to Brightwave's pricing.
