Brightwave raises $15M to accelerate financial research with AI – SiliconANGLE

Brightwave Inc., creator of an artificial intelligence-powered financial research platform for investment banks, hedge fund managers and other finance professionals, said today it has closed on a $15 million early-stage round of funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by Decibel Partners and saw participation from Omers Ventures, bringing the company’s total amount raised to date to $21 million.

Brightwave says its AI platform is all about providing accurate insights and forecasts to financial professionals, so they can make smarter investment decisions. Its AI system works by synthesizing insights from thousands of pages of financial reports and documents, including earnings reports and transcripts, news reports, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, web content, side-sell research and proprietary knowledge bases.

The startup says it wants to automate the most tedious parts of the investing workflow and help customers to spot opportunities that others have missed. To do this, it has built its platform around a proprietary knowledge graph that’s constructed from those data sources and hundreds of others. It crunches all of this information to try and understand the structure of global markets in more granular detail, so it can surface anything that might impact the value of investments.

Decibel Partners’ Alessio Fanelli said he believes Brightwave’s knowledge graph will be a game-changer for financial analysts. “Markets are driven by very complex relationships, and Brightwave’s knowledge graph helps you to understand the second- and third-order effects of any information, not just the surface-level implications,” he said.

Layered on top of Brightwave’s knowledge graph is an AI-powered reasoning system that aims to make sense of everything. Its job is to connect the dots between all of the data that’s fed into the knowledge graph, so it can identify the most critical drivers of asset performance.

Users can interact with Brightwave’s platform using a familiar chat interface. When analysts ask it a question, it will synthesize thousands or even millions of pieces of content across text, tables, images and audio to create a dynamic and interactive report.

The startup says its reports are really more like “living documents” because they have the ability to adapt and update themselves dynamically as users adds their own insights, and more up-to-date data becomes available. Users can then drill down into the reports, asking additional questions, to explore the deeper implications of their findings.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Mike Conover said it’s extremely difficult to build an AI system that can autonomously reason about the structure of the global economy. But he believes that today’s funding round proves that his company is rising to the challenge.

“Brightwave users, from startups to large incumbents, regularly tell us our platform is more sophisticated than anything else they’ve tried in terms of both depth of insight and product functionality,” Conover said.

To stress that point, Conover pointed out the company’s rapid growth. He said it has effectively quadrupled its revenue since closing on its $6 million seed funding round in June, though he didn’t provide more specific numbers. Its client base spans everything from hedge funds and private credit investors to boutique consultancies and some of the world’s largest asset managers.

Looking ahead, Brightwave will use the money from today’s round to invest in engineering talent, accelerate its research, build up its computing infrastructure and forge strategic data partnerships to enhance its underlying knowledge graph.

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