BOULDER — A Boulder-based AI technology company is “going for the fences,” after raising $21 million to expand its product to more of the financial world.
Brightwave Inc. began raising money in June with a $6 million seed round, and recently raised another $15 million to bring its platform to larger markets.
The platform is an AI-generated insight collection tool for diverse asset managers and financial services institutions, ranging from long-short hedge funds and private credit investors to advisory firms and large institutional asset managers .
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“We’re seeing very strong demand for this business across financial services,” said Michael Conover, the company’s founder and CEO. We’re struggling to build and hire fast enough to keep up. We are faced with a good problem to have.
Conover has been making AI products for 15 years and moved to Boulder from San Francisco five years ago. He launched Brightwave 16 months ago with his co-founder and chief technology officer, Brandon Kotara, former CTO of federally regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse LedgerX.
“Markets are the ultimate manifestation of how humans represent value,” Conover said. “So we develop tools and products that improve our ability to understand markets. This is something that has fascinated me for a long time.
The Brightwave platform digs deeper into companies that others are considering investing in. It extracts and aggregates press releases, earnings statements and public filings, breaking news and more to build a more complete financial picture of a company.
“If you think about the job of an active asset manager, who works at a mutual fund or an investment bank…you’re trying to understand something about a business that’s not obvious. Our assessment is that it is not a task well suited to the human intellect,” Conover explained. “They’re trying to put pieces of a puzzle together to support a decision.
According to a press release, “at the top of the knowledge graph is a powerful reasoning system that unlocks more than just answers to top-tier questions and research. With Brightwave, finance professionals are able to connect the dots on incredibly large bodies of content, identify subtle changes to management guidelines over time, evaluate dozens of names simultaneously, and spot the key drivers of asset performance that others have missed.
Conover said the company would use the money to “invest in people, data and compute.”
“This type of AI computing is not cheap and we are building a very ambitious company,” he said.
Conover didn’t have to try too hard to raise the funds. His investors came to them, he said.
“We had a lot of money on hand,” Conover said. “Investors approached us and said we should take more. This will enable us to build data partnerships that will radically transform the face of business.
One of these investors was OMERS Ventures.
“Brightwave’s Financial Knowledge Graph transforms the way investors approach research and decision-making,” said Henry Gladwyn, managing partner of OMERS Ventures, in a press release. “We are proud to support them as they transform modern financial data sets into timely, actionable insights.” »
While the company will use some of its new funding to open an office in New York, Conover said he plans to keep his office in Boulder.
“We love building Colorado, we are a multi-location team. Boulder is a great place to start a business. The reality of working in 2024 is that you can successfully run a venture-backed business from anywhere in the country. And in Colorado, there’s an AI-advanced governor, and there’s a lot of attractive things about him. We built an office on Pearl Street. I see the Flatirons from my office window.
According to a press release, “Brightwave’s founding team has decades of experience in artificial intelligence and financial services, attracting talent from the likes of Databricks, Meta, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Scale.ai and McKinsey.”
Conover, he and his team accomplished more in 16 months than what took competitors years.
“We have over a decade of work ahead of us, we are heading for the fences,” Conover said. “I don’t have (more) plans to raise capital, but we’re building a big business, and ours tends to be very resource-intensive.”
- *This story has been updated to correct the time frame to 17 months, during which the company raised $21 million.