Auquan (see Pulse 2.0 profile here), an AI-based innovator in financial services, announced a $4.5 million addition to its seed round. This funding was led by Peak XV with continued participation from Neotribe Ventures. This brings the total seed funding to $8 million.
Auquan is the first AI solution to utilize an AI agent architecture and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to automate deep knowledge-intensive workflows in financial services. About 25% of the top 20 global asset managers, investment banks, and private equity firms utilize Auquan to unlock transformative productivity gains, make better-informed decisions faster, and outperform their competitors.
This new funding will be primarily allocated to expand Auquan’s engineering and sales teams. New hires will be at the forefront of solving some of the most complex challenges in the financial industry, working with state-of-the-art AI architectures to revolutionize how financial institutions handle deep, knowledge-intensive tasks and expand market presence.
Although horizontal generative AI tools are gaining popularity for shallow tasks like enterprise search and customer support—which are typically limited to simple searches or single query-response interactions—Auquan was designed to handle deep work—complex, recurring, multistep workflows that are vital to business operations and demand specialized knowledge, sustained focus, and precision.
Finance teams are filled with brilliant professionals who specialize at deep work, such as writing 20-50-page investment and credit memos, conducting due diligence, managing compliance, monitoring risk, and producing detailed ESG reports. Even though some of this work differentiates your firm, other complex and time-intensive aspects—like searching through lengthy documents or drafting reports—are essential yet undifferentiated.
Auquan frees your top talent from these time-consuming yet routine aspects of deep knowledge work, enabling them to instead focus on high-value, strategic work that drives the business forward and enhances competitiveness.
Auquan’s RAG-based architecture was designed to handle deep knowledge workflows by decomposing them into discrete tasks. And these workflows in financial services can involve hundreds of parallel and sequential steps, with each output feeding into the next. This complexity requires a sophisticated approach, where the model breaks down problems into manageable parts and takes the necessary time to process each — reflecting the thoughtfulness of human reasoning. Plus, Auquan’s architecture is purpose-built to navigate these intricate workflows, delivering outputs that meet high accuracy, comprehensiveness, and trust standards, as demanded by clients like UBS, Federated Hermes, and BC Partners.
Auquan can generate what typically requires days of manual effort in minutes. For instance, it might traditionally take an analyst five days to research and write a 30-page draft credit memo on a company, while Auquan can generate one in five minutes with greater attention to detail and thoroughness. Auquan’s customers are experiencing similar productivity gains for deep workflows such as producing investment memos, responding to RFPs, screening business involvement, ESG performance reporting, and KYB compliance screening.
Auquan processes internal and external structured and unstructured datasets. It delivers industry-leading global coverage of public and private companies (550,000+) and public and subscription data sources (2M+) originating in over 65 languages. It includes native processing for the top 30 countries by GDP and key supply chain locations. Opportunity and risk insights are automatically organized and prioritized based on unique customer priorities — and mapped controversies and impact to international frameworks such as SFDR (PAI), SDGs, SASB, UNGC, and modern slavery acts (UK, Australia, German Supply Chain Act).
Auquan provides turnkey support out-of-the-box for common financial services workflows with a time-to-value measured in minutes. Auquan also supports custom automation for unique workflow requirements.
KEY QUOTES:
“Auquan’s remarkable growth and customer traction validates our belief that they’re uniquely positioned to solve a critical challenge in finance: freeing highly skilled teams from the grind of wading through noisy data, performing undifferentiated work to support high-impact decisions. Their RAG-based AI agent architecture is truly transformative, allowing professionals to focus on strategic, meaningful work while enabling firms to gain a competitive edge. We’re thrilled to support Auquan as they revolutionize deep work productivity and decision-making in finance.”
- Swaroop Kolluri, founder and managing partner, Neotribe
“In an industry where billions can be gained or lost in moments, time is the most valuable asset. Auquan gives it back. By automating the repetitive work that consumes most of the day for finance professionals, we’re unleashing productivity on an industrial scale. Three years from now, the brightest minds in finance will look back and wonder why they ever had to spend days sifting through hundreds of documents and typing up lengthy reports and memos.”
- Chandini Jain, co-founder and CEO of Auquan
