Bright wave, an AI-powered research assistant that generates insightful and reliable financial analysis on any topic, today announced $6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Decibel Partners with support from Point72 Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and angel investors including executives from OpenAI, Databricks, Uber and LinkedIn. Founded by engineers with deep expertise in artificial intelligence and financial infrastructure, co-founders Mike Conover and Brandon Kotara have over 20 years of combined experience building AI and machine learning products.
Brightwave builds and trains proprietary AI systems that synthesize reliable, insightful analysis from a corpus of hundreds of millions of documents, including breaking news, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, sell-side research, market data, enterprise knowledge base content and high-quality information signal, long-tail material from the public Internet. In just four months, Brightwave’s client base has grown to include a diverse range of funds, firms and strategies with over $120 billion in assets under management, ranging from owner-operated RIAs to $20 billion crossover hedge funds whose trades move markets global.
Brightwave accelerates core information processing workflows and increases the quality and depth of thought that financial professionals can bring to any topic. Investment research teams at the world’s largest asset management companies operate Brightwave to quickly learn about fresh sectors, dive deeper into specific stocks, discover and analyze opportunities in private markets, and develop investment thesis based on fact patterns synthesized in massive troves of content. Similarly, wealth management clients leverage Brightwave to grow AUM and deliver exceptional client experiences that are deeply curated on topics that influence purchasing decisions and create insightful market commentary at scale.
Prior to founding Brightwave, Mike Conover founded and led open source language model engineering at Databricks, where he co-created Databricks Dolly. Brandon Kotara is the former CTO of LedgerX, a federally regulated derivatives exchange and clearing house that matches and clears trades for the largest institutional asset managers in the world.
Brightwave’s growing team has decades of combined experience in AI/ML, semantic search, knowledge graphing and enterprise financial systems. Its founding team includes NeurIPS-published research engineers with deep expertise in language model design and development, as well as talent from Meta and Goldman Sachs.