Auquan – an AI innovator for financial services – recently announced the closing of its $3.5 million seed round, led by early-stage investor Neotribe Ventures. The company also announced its Auquan Intelligence Engine, powered by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI. The company’s SaaS-based product helps customers like UBS and Federated Hermes extract intelligence from the world’s unstructured data to power business due diligence, research, compliance, and risk monitoring.
Many financial companies are flooded with textual content containing material information and highly compensated professionals across investment banks, private equity firms, and asset managers who spend significant time gathering and processing it all. Auquan collects this data and surfaces relevant insights, empowering finance professionals to refocus their time from mundane tasks to analyzing insights and making strategic decisions faster. Some of the largest asset managers, investment banks, and private equity funds in the U.S. and Europe already started deploying Auquan.
Neotribe Ventures led this funding round, with participation from Episode 1 and Stage 2 Capital. And Auquan is using the funding round to continue developing its RAG AI-powered intelligence engine and expand its market presence in the United States. Auquan was a 2018 TechStars London cohort member and raised $1 million in pre-seed financing previously.
Auquan’s Intelligence Engine is the only solution for financial services that leverages RAG AI, a cutting-edge AI technique pioneered by Meta that is designed to handle the kinds of knowledge-intensive tasks that financial services demand. And RAG AI combines the power of AI-driven information retrieval systems and generative AI to bridge the gap between static knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and the need for dynamic, context-aware generation in financial services.
Generative AI tools have limited utility in the financial services industry since they lack access to up-to-date information. And the retrieval component of RAG AI makes it capable of accessing real-time updates to information pertinent to specific use cases. The generative part can be tweaked to generate responses only from detailed, credible information. This result is enterprise-ready output that is comprehensive, trustworthy, and accurate.
Auquan’s Intelligence Engine was designed to streamline any process which requires swift collection and processing of vast volumes of unstructured text, including company reports, regulatory documents, 10-Ks and 10-Qs, broker research, legal filings, and news coverage, to drive decision-making. Examples include:
1.) Private company pre-screening and due diligence — For private equity and debt funds, a fast-tracked screening of potential investments are able to shift their decision window earlier for a competitive advantage. And Auquan offers in-depth insights into over 500,000 global companies, both private and public. This enables customers to swiftly access previously unavailable data and analyze key details about potential investments, from their industry, product and growth potential to their management team and hidden risks.
2.) Know your customer (KYC) and background checks — Regulatory compliance, including KYC, background checks, and anti-money laundering protocols, often involves a tedious process of collecting, verifying and evaluating information from multiple sources. And Auquan improves the efficiency, accuracy and timeliness of these checks by automating information retrieval from verified sources, summarizing data, and providing real-time risk monitoring and alerts.
3.) ESG and sustainability research and monitoring — Sustainability evaluations are vital in investment decision-making but have become increasingly subject to regulatory requirements. Auquan’s Intelligence Engine scans historical data and monitors real-time developments to identify greenwashing and uncover ESG issues, business conduct risks, or controversies, even those hidden within company supply chains. Auquan aligns incidents with global industry frameworks like SFDR (PAI), SDGs, SASB and UNGC for effortless and accurate reporting.
KEY QUOTES:
“Auquan’s product surfaces valuable ‘unknown unknowns’ for our emerging market portfolios without requiring us to search. Auquan’s ability to identify hidden information in local languages from noisy data that other tools often overlook has enhanced our in-house research and saved us a considerable amount of time we would otherwise spend managing all of this data.”
— Kunjal Gala, head of global emerging markets at Federated Hermes
“It’s rare to see a shift as significant as AI. Auquan is uniquely positioned to leverage RAG in order to make generative AI viable for financial services and help firms unlock the value of the world’s unstructured data. We’re thrilled about the future in partnering with the Auquan team as they continue to innovate and expand on their vision.”
— Rebecca Mitchem, partner at Neotribe Ventures and co-leader of Ignite, Neotribe’s growth-stage fund
“RAG AI represents a major breakthrough for making generative AI viable for knowledge-intensive tasks in the enterprise. But it still requires significant domain expertise and a deep understanding of the user workflows to actually deliver the productivity and performance gains that generative AI promises. Auquan stands out because we are laser focused on financial services, we understand our customers’ challenges and what ‘good’ looks like for them, and we have fine-tuned our product with feedback from our users on how best to integrate in their workflows and consistently deliver value.”
— Chandini Jain, co-founder and CEO of Auquan
