The Scoop
Investors across private and public markets are being buffeted by uncertainty. One AI startup, backed by Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures, aims to at least save them time by handling grunt research work so investors can focus on what matters: making money.
Brightwave, a Colorado-based startup, launched a deep research tool for private market investors that reads business documents and produces a short report analyzing key data points, the startup exclusively told Semafor.
To use the tool, investors upload documents — like proprietary financial records, board meeting minutes, shareholder agreements, and customer contracts — for companies in their portfolio or companies they are looking to fund. Then they input their research goals or questions they want answered — for example, clarity about the business model or risks. Brightwave’s system pulls relevant data points from the documents and produces a report with citations.
As businesses scramble to understand how the Trump administration’s tariffs and shifting geopolitical strategy will affect them, AI-powered data analysis tools can help investors quickly identify their exposures, the startup argues — an assessment that would take an analyst hours to do manually. But there are risks that AI will get numbers or analysis wrong. Hallucinations are decreasing, although some models still struggle with complex math.
“In the situation we are in now, there’s going to be a new issue of the week,” said Henry Gladwyn, managing partner at the venture capital arm of Canadian pension giant OMERS, which invested in Brightwave. “In a volatile environment, you just need to be faster.”
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Brightwave has raised $21 million over two funding rounds in the last year. Co-founder Mike Conover, who previously built Databricks’ open-source large language model, Dolly, hopes the report builder tool can simplify the hours of work investors and associates spend searching through documents, allowing them to spend that time building relationships and reviewing more deals, he said.
Conover thinks his platform, which he said boasts accuracy in the “high 90s,” can help investors maintain the quality of their data. When humans are tasked with finding information from documents, “it leads to a lot of long weekends and late nights,” he said. “Your eyes start to glaze over after several hundred pages of something.”
James Burrell, a business attorney, said the technology could help smaller funds compete with industry giants and their armies of associates doing this work. Relying on AI to investigate multimillion-dollar deals also comes with risks, he said. While case law hasn’t yet tested the issue, Burrell expects it will be difficult for investors to blame AI tools for any hallucination or error.
Step Back
Financial firms have long utilized the latest technologies for an edge over their competitors — from high frequency trading and the Bloomberg Terminal to web scraping software. Now, they’re looking to AI tools to filter pitches, deepen research, and analyze financial data.
Banks are some of the top recruiters of AI talent, and have been both working to develop their own tools and partnering with AI heavyweights to access theirs. BNY recently struck a deal with OpenAI to integrate its deep research tool and reasoning models into its internal AI platform, which is now available to more than 50,000 employees. Morgan Stanley has similarly partnered with OpenAI to develop internal tools, including ones that summarize reports and search research documents for information.
Perplexity has also emerged as a competitor in deep research. Japanese investment firm SoftBank is helping the AI company launch its research product to corporate customers in Japan after implementing it internally.