Reflexivity is a company that offers analytics and artificial intelligence-based solutions for the investment industry. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Reflexivity President and co-founder Giuseppe Sette to learn more about the company.
Giuseppe Sette’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Sette said:
“I earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from La Sapienza University and then went to Wharton for my MBA.”
“My first stint was in consulting, with Bain’s Milan office. After business school, I moved to London and worked at Davidson Kempner and Brevan Howard.”
“Prior to founding Reflexivity, I served as Co-CIO of global macro at Lombard Odier alongside Jan Szilagyi, Reflexivity’s CEO and Co-Founder. Since starting Reflexivity, I focused on our core mission – iterate on stronger and more powerful investment AIs.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Sette shared:
“Reflexivity was born when Jan and I were Co-CIOs of Global Macro at Lombard Odier. We dreamed up an AI-powered market analytics platform that we could chat with as we would with a junior analyst – a platform able to monitor markets around the clock and answer important investment questions. This idea was really born from our day-to-day work needs, from our acknowledgement that keeping up with the ever-mounting piles of financial data is a real challenge for any manager. Why not leverage technology to recognize important events and conduct financial analyses for us?”
“Stanley Druckenmiller was among the first who recognized the value of what we were building and offered to support our efforts as our first investor. Thanks to his support, Reflexivity took off with a mission to provide every investor and advisor with powerful AI tools in an easy-to-navigate, chat interface.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Sette reflected:
“There are so many good ones – seeing customers engage with our AIs for the first time is certainly one; having fun with the team after a long day is another; brainstorming on R&D directions with investors is a third one. It’s been a good journey so far.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Sette explained:
“We have a range of cutting-edge products at Reflexivity. For one, our language interface and Reasoning Assistants allow investors to use natural language as an interface for discovery and AI-driven data analysis of financial information. Assistants understand and translate user questions to provide answers that are collated and ranked by confidence.”
“A feature we are really excited about is our Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph models real-world relationships pertinent to financial markets (e.g. thematic exposure, peers, suppliers, customers, partners, geographic exposure) and enables LLMs to answer hard investment questions, reaching cogent conclusions that can drive the decision-making process of an investment manager.”
“Our Screener enables filtering of a universe of 40,000+ assets and securities from our Knowledge Graph like theme and country exposure, and thousands of quantitative metrics, including free cash flow growth month-over-month (MoM).”
“We also have Insights, where we process structured and unstructured data in order to understand what is currently relevant to a security. Our insights range from fundamental insights, where changes in business dynamics could impact the stock price, to news insights, where certain news could impact the price.”
“Another core capability of the Reflexivity platform is the Scenario Analysis Engine. The facility allows users to ask ‘what if’ questions, such as: what happens when the S&P is up 5 days in a row? What securities do well when the Fed cuts rates?”
“Our charting capability lets users plot economic data, financial metrics and real-time prices for over 40,000 assets. The UI is very flexible: just ask for what you want. There is no need for Googling dates or manually setting time windows.”
“Finally, Document Search and Summarization gives users the ability to do Q&A on unstructured data, like PDF company decks and sell-side research. The solution was built with emphasis on retrieval and interpretation of information from charts, figures, and tables, along with citations and links back to the primary-source documents.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Sette and the team face in building the company? Sette acknowledged:
“The key challenge in our sector is to “keep it real”: to make sure your AIs provide meaningful input to investment and wealth managers. We see many competing efforts that lack experience in the field and provide output that is too theoretical and ineffective. Our experience in the field helps us focus on core use cases, to provide impactful AI support to investment professionals.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Sette noted:
“We have always been at the forefront of AI and finance, even before the recent interest in AI. When we started Reflexivity in 2019, the idea was to create a product specifically for institutional investors that focused more on our Insights. Then, the world significantly changed with the Covid lockdown, and we saw a huge influx of retail investors in investing, so we added a tool that was a more simplified version of Reflexivity for them.”
“Most recently, we have been able to shift our focus back to institutional investors with the AI boom and added features such as our Knowledge Graph and Document Summarization.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Sette cited:
“These will certainly include our funding milestones, including our B round that is about to close, as well as our major commercial successes – some of which we have not announced yet. From a company perspective, growing the team to over 40 people has certainly given us a sense of scale that we missed when we were 5 people in a room.”
Funding
When asking Sette about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We just raised our Series B round for $30 million.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sette assessed:
“A conservative TAM for our product is about $16.3 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition?
“We focus on knowledge. Vertical AI applications show the greatest promise, inside and outside of finance, but they require access to increasingly large repositories of foundational knowledge. LLMs are great for active reasoning, but less capable of storing a growing knowledge base. Our Knowledge Graph solutions enable LLMs to access specialized repositories of knowledge that are easy to expand and update.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Sette concluded:
“We are really working on 2 axis of development – increase the scope of the skills that LLMs can learn from our Knowledge Graph and increase the depth of each skill i.e. the complexity of problems it can tackle. We are truly building a repository of institutional investing knowledge.”
