Due diligence is a pricey enterprise, and never simply within the realm of investing. Even for an organization making an attempt to launch a brand new product or discover a partnership, discovering the proper knowledge and doing the analysis can take weeks and get very pricey if they’re to make an informed determination — particularly when third social gathering companies and consultants get entangled.
A brand new AI startup referred to as Bridgetown Research says it may well make a dent in that price base and pace up the method through the use of AI brokers that may do many of the knowledge assortment and analysis work that goes into due diligence. And as a part of this effort, the startup not too long ago raised $19 million in a Sequence A spherical co-led by Accel and Lightspeed.
Co-founded in December 2023 by its CEO Harsh Sahai, a former McKinsey worker and analysis scientist at Amazon, Bridgetown Analysis has constructed three forms of AI brokers that it claims can collect info, collate and condense that knowledge, and eventually current it in an easy-to-read format.
Bridgetown is exploiting the very networks that consultants and researchers typically use to collect insights: networks of trade specialists who can present insights on a selected firm or sector. The startup primarily companions with these knowledgeable networks, after which makes use of its AI voice agent to interview specialists for the data the corporate wants to search out for its shoppers.
“As a result of insiders don’t need to schedule a name with a human being, they’ll go surfing each time and have a dialog,” Sahai mentioned in an interview. “As an alternative of speaking to at least one senior govt, you may discuss to mid-tenure individuals, however much more of them… at a a lot greater scale.”
Bridgetown’s second set of brokers then use large-language fashions (LLMs) alongside instruments for clustering and regression to interpret the info collected by the voice brokers, and move this info again to the LLMs to summarize the solutions. Lastly, the third set of brokers makes use of small-language fashions to breed the interpretation in a digestible kind, like a presentation.
Utilizing these brokers, the startup says it may well produce an preliminary due diligence evaluation in 24 hours with inputs from a whole bunch of respondents.
Sahai mentioned shoppers can both use Bridgetown’s brokers to collect knowledge and insights on their very own, or they’ll rent an impartial marketing consultant or a small consulting agency to work with the brokers to get the identical high quality of research as they might from corporations like McKinsey or Bain.
That sounds interesting, however massive language fashions and the AI brokers constructed on prime of them nonetheless are likely to hallucinate — they have a tendency to only make up info. So how is an investor to belief analysis reproduced by an AI agent? Sahai says the startup addresses this with its “steerability and auditability” strategy.
This implies, he defined, shoppers can overview the info and hint each step the agent took to reach at its conclusions, much like the “reasoning” AI fashions on the market. Moreover, the voice brokers document their conversations with the specialists they interview in order that the data could be manually verified.
He added that the AI brokers don’t depend on a single knowledge supply. As an alternative, they collect info from a number of sources, interpret it utilizing massive language fashions, after which make use of fine-tuned fashions to course of the info.
“We haven’t seen our strategy earlier than,” Sahai mentioned. “Most platforms depart it to you to gather the data you want, after which they may course of it in your behalf.”
Bridgetown isn’t the primary to deal with this chance to make due diligence simpler — we have already got startups like Mako AI and DiligentIQ within the area. Nevertheless, Sahai thinks different platforms don’t present a whole sufficient resolution.
Bridgetown Analysis has two prospects within the U.Ok. and a dozen within the U.S. These embrace top-tier personal fairness and enterprise capital funds, consulting corporations, and large firms that handle the M&A pipeline, Sahai mentioned.