Highlights:

  • The business wants to help financial analysts, who have long struggled with information overload, by bringing the power of generative AI, which refers to systems that can generate text and graphics from written instructions.
  • Portrait Analytics is creating a question-and-answer-based tool that combines generative AI’s search and summarization skills to assist analysts.

A USD 3 million pre-seed funding round has been finalized, according to Portrait Analytics, a startup developing a research platform for investment analysts powered by generative artificial intelligence.

A number of unidentified partners from renowned hedge funds participated in the round, which was led by .406 Ventures.

The startup wants to help financial analysts, who have long struggled with information overload, by bringing the power of generative AI, which refers to systems that can generate text and graphics from written instructions. They are constantly under pressure to be up to date on all the businesses in their service area, which necessitates spending countless hours looking through various files and documentation. Speed and timing are crucial; thus, this is an area where AI-powered support is highly beneficial.

In order to help analysts, Portrait Analytics is creating a question-and-answer-based tool that combines generative AI’s search and summarization skills.  Analysts can instruct it to carry out specific tasks or ask it questions, and it will respond by gathering and analyzing the necessary data from a large number of files and papers.

It is claimed that the conclusions it draws are factual, transparent, and fully audited. By doing this, Portrait Analytics hopes that its Q and amp;A assistant will eventually be able to take on the responsibilities of a junior investment analyst, including making pitches, creating memos, and creating financial models.

David Plon, the Co-founder, and CEO of Portrait Analytics spent nearly five years as a lead analyst on the public markets team at the hedge fund Baupost Group LLC. He is qualified to understand the exact needs of analysts.

Plon mentioned that during his Baupost’s tenure, he used to run under pressure and never got sufficient time to research the companies he encountered or entirely evaluate a thesis. “At Portrait, we’re building the personal research assistant I always wished I had, one that would massively expand my bandwidth for finding and consuming information critical to the investment research process,” he added.

Analysts can join to access Portrait’s platform in private beta right now, with general release coming soon after.

Managing Partner and Co-founder of .406 Ventures, Liam Donohue, stated that he has interacted with several investment analysts to gain insights into their meticulous and ineffective research operations. “Over and again they lamented the lack of a technology solution that could help them make better decisions faster. The experience, expertise, and vision that David and his team bring to building Portrait will be transformative in solving this massive and important problem,” he added.