Happy Sunday, everyone!

The markets might be closed, but your inbox isn't. We're here to bring you a little holiday reading before the festivities begin – our first deep dive in a while (because hey, we get busy too). Consider this your break from scrambling for last-minute gifts or dodging family debates about the best Christmas movie (it's Die Hard, obviously).

This time, we're diving into the rise of AI in finance. Sure, AI has been the buzzword of the year, but it's more than just hype; it's remarkably changing the way professionals work. From cutting down research time to making smarter and faster decisions, AI is becoming the not-so-secret weapon for getting ahead. You owe it to yourself to learn how to leverage AI to become a better deal maker / investor.

We're excited to get back to these deep dives and highlight the trends shaping the future of finance. Stay tuned for more in the new year. So grab your coffee (or eggnog, we won't judge), and let's get into it.

For the majority of seasoned investment professionals, managing and code-switching between multiple work streams is second nature. "Alt + Tab" is your go-to keyboard shortcut to toggle through Excel, Bloomberg, Spotify, and Chrome like a ninja. 🥷⌨️

Sorting through piles of earnings reports or digging into hundreds of documents for a live deal is already a marathon. Add in the constant flood of SEC filings, investor decks, sell-side reports, expert transcripts, alt data, breaking news, CNBC soundbites, the Rizzler randomly on Fox Business, and it starts to feel like a never-ending obstacle course.

The stakes are high. Miss a key detail or trend, and you could blow a big opportunity. In the nonstop hustle of finance, staying ahead can feel like running uphill on a treadmill. That's why Wall Street professionals are always on the hunt for tools to help them simplify the chaos and focus on making sharp, game-changing decisions.

As the pressure ramps up, the need for smarter tools to simplify the madness has never been greater. AI is stepping in, transforming research and decision-making, and bringing clarity where old-school methods just can't keep up.

AI in Finance: A Catalyst for Transformation

Generative AI is rewriting the playbook, making research and decision-making faster and smarter.

It's like the jump from scribbling on paper ledgers to using Excel, but now the challenge is tackling a mountain of data. Even behemoths like BlackRock and Vanguard believe generative AI is shaking up productivity in finance, where the data just keeps piling up.

Think of it like this: back in the 1970s, accountants had to slog through every calculation by hand, double-checking everything and praying they didn't mess up. It was slow, painful, and frankly, awful. Then Excel came along, and what used to take hours could suddenly be done in minutes. It’s hard to imagine how any serious work got done without excel spreadsheets.

The same thing needs to be done today for the crazy amount of information we deal with in finance every day.

Investment bankers and institutional investors are buried under endless news articles, research reports, and documents. It's way too much for anyone to process efficiently.

That's where Brightwave steps in to serve as the modern solution to data overload. Brightwave speeds up reading, reasoning, and decision-making by taking on the heavy lifting.

By turning mountains of raw data into clear, actionable insights, finance professionals can now make smarter strategic choices with confidence. 

What’s Buzzing at Brightwave?

The industry has taken notice of Brightwave’s capabilities, with the company already raising $21M to date, including a $6M seed round and a $15M Series A from prominent investors such as Decibel Partners and Point72 Ventures.

Since announcing its seed round in June 2024 to its Series A in October, the startup has quadrupled its revenue – impressive for a company still in its early days. But Brightwave isn't just a platform; it represents a new paradigm for finance professionals. 

So what's making Brightwave stand out in an industry that loves its Bloomberg Terminals and Excel spreadsheets? 

The Team

Behind every breakthrough is a team of visionaries who bring it to life. Brightwave's rapid ascent isn't just about cutting-edge technology, it's about the people who built it. 

From seasoned AI pioneers to finance veterans from Goldman Sachs, UBS, McKinsey, FT Partners, and Scale.ai, this team's combined expertise uniquely positions them to revolutionize how financial professionals work.

Backgrounds of the founders:

• Mike Conover (co-founder and CEO) is a pioneer in the field of AI. Mike established and led open-source LLM engineering at Databricks (valued at $62B) where he created Dolly, the language model that showed the world how easy it is to build LLMs that can talk and reason (That's pretty cool). Mike has built AI systems & products for more than fifteen years, including tours of duty at Workday as Director of Financials Machine Learning, SkipFlag (acquired by Workday), and LinkedIn. He also holds a PhD in complexity science from Indiana University, and his work has been featured in Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Hacker News, Nature Communications, MIT Technology Review, and NPR.

• Brandon Kotara (co-founder and CTO) previously served as CTO of LedgerX, a federally-regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse that serves some of the largest institutional asset managers in the world. Brandon also has deep expertise in AI and ML. As technical lead for Workday's machine learning for human capital management, Brandon oversaw the creation of semantic search systems operating at the scale of hundreds of millions of documents. His first deep learning patent was filed in 2018.

Through first-hand experience and conversations with fund managers, Mike and Brandon realized just how messy, inefficient, and antiquated financial workflows are across organizations.

At private equity funds, due diligence and data room reviews often rely on armies of highly-paid associates to grind through thousands of pages of dense information. Their output is a result of sheer manpower and is highly inefficient.

With the team's experience building advanced AI systems, running financial platforms, and working directly in public market investing, they knew there had to be a better, more scalable way to handle the inefficiencies in financial workflows. They came together to launch Brightwave as their answer. Brightwave tackles these challenges by making processes faster, clearer, and much more efficient through the power of generative AI.

Why Brightwave?

Brightwave was built to shake things up, giving users a real edge by turning data into a strategic advantage. It stands out by delivering clear insights, customizable workflows, and quick, reliable results, making it a must-have for finance professionals.

1. Actionable insights across markets

Covering dozens of names during earnings season or analyzing a data room for a time-sensitive diligence means time is always of the essence. 

That's where Brightwave steps in.

Imagine earnings season: You've already downed 3 cups of coffee, dealing with your superiors, juggling client requests, seeing your group chat blow up, andddd you have to cover dozens of companies all releasing reports at once. You have way too much going on and not enough time to get everything done. 

Normally, you'd spend hours parsing through transcripts, piecing together tone, sentiment, and critical trends. Then you have to do it again for all the companies you're covering. It's monotonous and not the best use of your time.

With Brightwave, it's done in seconds.

Summaries, tone analysis, and key insights are served up instantly, so you can focus on strategy and decision-making instead of wading through endless documents.

Supply chain disruptions? M&A whispers? Regulatory hurdles? Brightwave has it covered.

As Brightwave's CEO, Mike, puts it:

2. Tailored workflows that actually work

No two finance professionals tackle their work the same way. A portfolio manager is laser-focused on performance, an analyst is buried in reports, and an investment banker's world revolves around deals. The real challenge is finding a tool that works with these different workflows, not against them.

Brightwave is built to service professional working across public markets (sales & trading, equity research, hedge funds) as well as private markets (investment banking, private equity, venture capital).

Take competitor benchmarking: normally, pulling together metrics from reports, earnings, and market data sucks up hours of your day (hours you'd rather spend on more productive things). Analysts will be thinking “how long until it’s intern season again? I need a hungry junior at Wharton to do this monotonous work for me”.

For another example, take PE due diligence: if you’re a private equity associate, you’ve spent way too much time going through data rooms looking for what’s helpful to get a deal through your investment committee. You’re staying at a nicely indexed deal room with financial info, tax docs, consulting studies, lawsuits, insurance, patents, etc. It’s an impossible task to read through tens of thousands of pages to know every little thing about the business. You once again wish it were intern season, so you could split up the work and give the most mind-numbing documents to an intern to summarize.

Now, you don’t have to wait until intern season to free up time. Brightwave cuts through the grunt work, serving up clean comparisons so you have more time to analyze trends and uncover opportunities without the headache.

Whether you're tracking sector shifts, figuring out if a CEO is secretly panicking, or identifying a major red flag that could kill a deal, Brightwave slots right into how you work and keeps things moving.

Benchmark competitors, track sector trends, or keep tabs on management sentiment; it's like having a team of junior analysts at your fingertips. 

3. Fast, trustworthy results

The problem isn't finding data, it's finding the right data when it actually matters (because "better late than never" doesn't cut it). Opportunities disappear faster than free drinks at happy hour, and no one has time to wade through thousands of pages.

Brightwave skips the drama and gets you the insights you need, exactly when you need them (without any interns or analysts being harmed in the process).

Digging into SEC filings or trying to spot market trends can feel like a full-time job on its own. The sheer amount of data out there makes it nearly impossible to keep up, let alone focus on the big picture.

Private equity due diligence? Even worse. You're stuck combing through data rooms, trying to figure out what contains critical info and what’s fluff that will not add any substance to your IC memo. By the time you've pulled it all together, the seller may have received another offer and entered into exclusivity. Your team will wish you could’ve arrived at a conclusion sooner.

The real game-changer is having something that can cut through the noise and surface exactly what matters… fast.

Brightwave processes this information and highlights the most relevant insights, cutting down the time it takes to understand market shifts and emerging opportunities.

Mike sums it up best:

Recall the saying “Time is Money.” Time is a valuable resource that you’ll never get back.

You’ve all heard the concept of compounding interest. The power of compounding helps a sum of money grow faster than if just simple interest were calculated on the principal alone. And the greater the number of compounding periods, the greater the compound interest growth will be.

Similarly, Brightwave can save you time and compound it, allowing you to focus on higher-value tasks and be more productive overall.

See below for a quick illustration of how powerful cumulative time saved can be over the course of a year.

This illustrates the time saved on just one employee. Now imagine you have an organization of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of financial professionals. The cumulative time saved by using AI (and specifically Brightwave’s platform) on Wall Street makes it a no brainer implementation, in our view.

Maybe there’s hope in making investment banking or private equity bearable in the long run by reducing hours and burnout.

4. Transparency You Can Trust

We need two things: speed and confidence that the info you're using won't come back to bite. It's not just about knowing the "what" – you need the "why" to back it up.

With sentence-level attribution, you're never left wondering where the insight came from (unlike that mystery Venmo charge from The Spaniard).

No fluff, no guesswork, just the kind of rock-solid intel you can trust in crunch time.

Competitive Landscape

The landscape of AI tools for finance is growing rapidly, with advancements redefining how professionals analyze and act on data. It's increasingly competitive at an incredible pace. Innovation is constantly raising the bar, pushing tools and platforms to keep pace with the demands of the industry.

Brightwave’s robust capabilities make it a comprehensive solution that can effectively address pain points spanning the sell side, buy side, private markets, and public markets.

What’s Next for Brightwave?

Brightwave has plenty in the works, like integrating with proprietary systems, adding proactive news updates, and offering innovative ways to customize the platform.

Mike further explains:

Brightwave is all in on generative AI, working to create more advanced workflows, smarter proactive features, and a co-pilot that's basically your new best friend at work (minus the coffee runs). 

In the next five years, the goal is ambitious but clear: to become as indispensable to finance professionals as Excel, excluding the endless troubleshooting when your formulas stop working.

Whether you're a research analyst, investment banker, or portfolio manager, it'll fit so seamlessly into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

The Bottom Line

Brightwave is the tool for today's challenges and the future of finance. Whether you're bracing for the next rate cut, trying to outpace the market, or navigating complex trends, Brightwave makes it easier to focus on what matters: results.

Now, about that coffee-fetching feature…

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