Leading AI financial research platform Brightwave announced the closing of a $15 million Series A funding round, led by Decibel Partners and with participation from OMERS Ventures. This funding round brings Brightwave’s total funding to $21 million following an oversubscribed Seed round in June. Brightwave also achieved four times revenue growth in the four months since the announcement of its seed funding.
Brightwave’s client base is growing rapidly, driven by demand from diverse asset managers and financial services institutions ranging from long-short hedge funds and private credit investors to boutique consultancies and some of the world’s largest institutional asset managers. And the platform’s ability to accelerate workflows and drive insight across markets and asset classes is a testament to the product’s powerful sector-agnostic AI capabilities, unique user interface that goes far beyond chat, and comprehensive data offerings.
The core of the Brightwave platform is a proprietary knowledge graph constructed from high-signal sources including SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, breaking news, and public internet content, that describes the structure of global markets in granular detail. And the Brightwave knowledge graph includes data on hundreds of factors such as supply chain relationships, M&A and governance changes as well as long-tail factors including expedited regulatory approvals, intellectual property litigation, cybersecurity events, and more.
Layered on the knowledge graph is a powerful reasoning system that unlocks more than just best-in-class question answering and search. Through Brightwave, finance professionals are able to connect the dots over impossibly large bodies of content, identifying subtle changes to management guidance over time, benchmarking dozens of names simultaneously, and spotting key drivers of asset performance that others have missed.
Brightwave’s founding team has decades of experience in AI and financial services, bringing talent from the likes of Databricks, Meta, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Scale AI and McKinsey. And Brightwave’s decision to field a lean, talent-dense team staffed with experts in machine learning and artificial intelligence has enabled it to achieve in just 16 months since its founding what has taken competitors years to accomplish. This approach, free from the constraints of legacy systems and bloated operational overhead, allows Brightwave to innovate rapidly and deliver transformative results faster than anyone else in the space.
Brightwave’s $15 million Series A funding will drive continued investments in sophisticated engineering and commercial talent, strategic data partnerships, and the research and compute investments required to enhance the Brightwave knowledge graph and reasoning engine.
The Series A funding round was preempted by Decibel Partners, reflecting strong investor confidence in Brightwave’s ability to dominate the AI-powered financial research space. And this investment, along with backing from some of the world’s largest asset managers, cements Brightwave’s ability to execute against an ambitious technology vision that will radically improve the day-to-day lives of finance professionals.
KEY QUOTES:
“Brightwave users, from startups to large incumbents, regularly tell us our platform is more sophisticated than anything else they’ve tried in terms of both depth of insight and product functionality. Building a system that can autonomously reason about the true structure of the global economy is a hard problem. At Brightwave, we’re solving it. Our technology-first approach is paying off for the business and for our customers.”
-Mike Conover, co-founder and CEO of Brightwave
“Brightwave’s knowledge graph is a game-changer. Markets are driven by very complex relationships: unlike other products, Brightwave helps you understand second- and third-order effects of any information, not just the surface-level implications. The platform’s ability to combine AI innovation and deep industry knowledge has allowed them to outperform legacy platforms, setting them apart as the clear leader in AI-powered financial research.”
-Alessio Fanelli, Partner, Decibel Partners
“Brightwave’s financial knowledge graph is transforming the way investors approach research and decision-making. We are proud to support them as they turn the firehose of modern financial data into timely, actionable insights.”
-Henry Gladwyn, Managing Partner, OMERS Ventures
