Pinegap has raised $8 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered equity research platform for institutional investors. Stellaris Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Inventus, Silicon Valley Quad and DeVC.
The New York-based company plans to use the financing to expand its go-to-market and sales capabilities, grow its engineering team and establish an internal team of former equity research analysts.
Pinegap works with hedge funds, long-only mutual funds and registered investment advisors to automate recurring research workflows through custom AI agents.
Rather than offering a general-purpose chatbot or search tool, Pinegap develops agents based on each investment firm’s research processes, investment theses, private data and preferred output formats.
The agents are designed to operate on a push-based model. Research outputs can be delivered directly to analysts on a predetermined schedule or generated in response to market events, reducing the need for users to repeatedly enter prompts or initiate searches.
Pinegap said it has deployed more than 1,000 AI agents across over 100 institutional clients. Those agents currently generate more than 50,000 research reports each month.
The platform can automate workflows such as earnings previews, company primers and investment thesis tracking.
By handling recurring and time-intensive research tasks, Pinegap aims to give analysts more time to focus on evaluating information, forming investment convictions and making portfolio decisions.
The company is targeting an institutional investment market in which analysts must follow large numbers of companies while managing growing amounts of financial, operational and market data.
According to Pinegap, a buy-side analyst may maintain primary coverage of 20 to 40 companies while monitoring hundreds of additional businesses for potential investment opportunities.
Many of the workflows associated with that coverage remain manual, including preparing for earnings announcements, updating company research and tracking developments that could support or weaken an investment thesis.
Pinegap’s agents are customized around how an individual fund operates rather than applying the same research process to every customer.
The platform can incorporate a client’s proprietary information and produce research in formats that match the firm’s existing internal workflows.
This approach is intended to make the AI-generated output more relevant to each fund’s strategy and reduce the work required to adapt generic research tools to institutional requirements.
Pinegap was founded in 2024 by Ankit Varmani and Deepak Sharma.
Varmani is a former JPMorgan analyst with approximately 15 years of institutional finance experience, including work at a New York-based hedge fund.
Sharma is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology and serves as Pinegap’s CEO.
The idea for the company emerged when Sharma contacted Varmani, who was preparing to launch his own investment fund, to learn more about equity research.
As Sharma worked through research assignments provided by Varmani, he began using large language models that were showing growing capabilities in financial analysis and information processing.
The founders concluded that many of the most repetitive and time-consuming components of institutional equity research could be automated with AI.
They subsequently built Pinegap to provide buy-side investment teams with customized research infrastructure reflecting the tools and workflows they had wanted while working in the industry.
Pinegap believes its combination of institutional finance expertise and enterprise AI technology will help it address the operational demands facing investment professionals.
Institutional asset managers are processing larger volumes of information while operating under tighter research timelines and continued pressure to improve investment performance.
The company aims to turn recurring research tasks into automated processes that run continuously in the background and deliver relevant information when analysts need it.
Pinegap is headquartered in New York and operates a technology team in Bangalore.
The Series A funding will support the company as it expands across U.S. hedge funds, mutual funds and registered investment advisors and builds additional internal capabilities around equity research and AI development.
KEY QUOTES:
“Buy-side analysts typically cover 20 to 40 companies in their main coverage while monitoring hundreds in their shopping list. Their days are structured around recurring, high-stakes workflows that are still largely done by hand.”
“Every workflow we automate, whether it’s an earnings preview, a company primer or a thesis tracker, is time an analyst gets back to focus on what only they can do: judgment, conviction and decisions. Pinegap isn’t a chatbot or a search tool. It’s a platform built around how a fund actually operates, tuned to their data, their format and their investment style.”
Deepak Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Pinegap
“Buy-side analysts and portfolio managers are among the most intellectually demanding and capacity-constrained professionals in financial services, and the tools they rely on have not kept pace with the volume and complexity of what they manage.”
“Pinegap is solving a real, high-stakes problem with a team that has lived it from both sides, the domain depth of a career analyst combined with the technical velocity of a product builder. What they have built in a short period of time, and the caliber of funds already using it, speaks for itself.”
Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners
