Boulder’s Brightwave raises $21M for expansion

FINANCIAL AI

By Sharon Dunn

BizWest / Prairie Mountain Media

A Boulder-based AI technology company is “swinging for the fences,” after raising $21 million to expand its product to more of the financial world.

Brightwave Inc. began raising money in June with a $6 million seed round, and more recently raised another $15 million to bring its platform to larger markets.

The platform is an AI-generated information gatherer for diverse asset managers and financial-services institutions ranging from long-short hedge funds and private credit investors to boutique consultancies and large institutional asset managers.

“We are seeing very vigorous demand for the business across financial services,” said Company founder and CEO Michael Conover. We are struggling to build and hire fast enough to keep up. We are faced with a good problem to have.”

Conover has been building AI products for 15 years, and he moved to Boulder from San Francisco five years ago. He started Brightwave 16 months ago with his co-founder and chief technology officer, Brandon Kotara, the former CTO of federally regulated derivatives exchange and clearinghouse LedgerX.

“The markets are the ultimate manifestation of how humans account for value,” Conover said. “So we’re building tools and products that enhance our ability to understand the markets. It’s something that’s long been a fascination of mine.”

The Brightwave platform does the deep-dive into information about companies in which others plan to invest. It mines and aggregates press releases, earning statements and public filings, breaking news, and more to build a more complete financial picture of a business.

“If you think about the job of an active asset manager, who works at a mutual fund or investment bank … you’re trying to understand something about a business that’s not obvious. Our assessment is, that is not a task well-suited to human intellect,” Conover explained. “They’re trying to put together pieces of a puzzle to support a decision.

According to a press release, “Layered atop the knowledge graph is a powerful reasoning system that unlocks more than just best-in-class question answering and search. With 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.”

Conover said the company will use the money to “invest in people, data and compute.“This kind of AI compute is not cheap and we are building a very ambitious business,” he said.

Conover didn’t have to try too hard to raise the money. His investors came to them, he said.

“We had a lot of money on hand,” Conover said. “Investors approached us and said we should take more. It will allow us to procure data partnerships that will radically transform the face of the business.”

One of those investors was OMERS Ventures.

“Brightwave’s financial knowledge graph is transforming the way investors approach research and decision-making,” Henry Gladwyn, managing partner of OMERS Ventures, said in a news release. “We are proud to support them as they turn the firehose of modern financial data into timely, actionable insights.”

While the company will use some of its new financing to open an office in New York, Conover said he plans to keep his office in Boulder.

“We love building Colorado, we’re a multi-site team. Boulder is a great place to start a business. The reality of work in 2024 is you can run a successful venture-backed business from anywhere in the country. And Colorado, there’s an AI-forward governor, lot of things that are attractive about it. We have built an office on Pearl Street. I see the Flatirons from my office window.”

According to a press release, “Brightwave’s founding team has decades of experience in artificial intelligence and financial services, drawing talent from the likes of Databricks, Meta, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Scale.ai and McKinsey.”

Conover and he and his team have achieved more in 16 months than what has taken competitors years to do.

“We have a decade plus of work ahead of us, we’re swinging for the fences,” Conover said. “I do not have (more) capital-raising plans, but we are building a big business, and ours tend to be very resource-intensive.”