Artificial intelligence-powered financial research startup Brightwave announced a $15 million Series A funding round this week. Decibel Partners, which led its initial seed round of $6 million in June, again led the A round.
While details of the funding round were not disclosed, OMERS Ventures also participated in the current round (OMERS Ventures is the venture capital arm of one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, representing retired Ontario municipal employees).
The previous seed round received backing from Point72 Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and angel investors, including executives from OpenAI, Databricks, Uber and LinkedIn.
This brings Brightwave’s total funding to $21 million.
According to the company’s announcement, the new investment will go toward continued hiring of engineering and commercial talent, strategic data partnerships, as well as for expanding its investments in research and computing infrastructure to further develop its knowledge graph and reasoning engine.
Brightwave was co-founded by Brandon Kotara and Mike Conover in early 2024 and is based in New York and Boulder, Colo. 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.
The company’s proprietary knowledge graph ingests numerous sources, including SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, breaking news and public internet content.
Brightwave is part of a flux of AI-powered analysts and agents that have come to market over the last two years to help many types of investment firms and financial institutions, from hedge funds to advisory firms, with more mundane but critical aspects of investment research and management.
