Bridgetown Research Raises $19M to Revolutionize AI-Driven Due Diligence

Bridgetown, a Seattle startup that uses AI agents to automate research tasks, raises $19M

Bridgetown Research, a Seattle-based startup that uses AI to help investment firms and corporate teams supercharge their research efforts, raised $19 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed and Accel. Founded in 2023, Bridgetown builds AI agents that crawl the internet and analyze datasets for various research use cases, such as assessing potential investments or acquisitions. The company also gathers unique data from customer surveys and its agents that can conduct voice interviews with industry experts. The ability to collect proprietary data could give Bridgetown an edge over similar AI-powered research tools from OpenAI and others. Bridgetown has reached a few million dollars in revenue within four months of its product launch. The company makes money from annual platform fees and variable fees based on usage. It also offers on-demand reports on a pay-per-report model. Bridgetown co-founder and CEO Harsh Sahai previously worked in strategy consulting at McKinsey and spent time at Amazon in applied machine learning. The Series A round also included participation from an unnamed leading research university. Sequoia Capital is also a backer. "Companies are built on the quality of strategic decisions, and the research and analysis behind it," Ishaan Preet Singh, an investor at Lightspeed, said in a statement. "Bridgetown Research enables the smartest executives and investors to make these decisions with an order of magnitude more information, and at a pace that was earlier impossible."

AI startup Bridgetown Research raises $19 million in latest funding

Feb 26 (Reuters) - Artificial Intelligence startup Bridgetown Research said on Wednesday it had raised $19 million in a funding round led by venture capital firms Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel, with participation from a leading research university. The Series A funding round valued the Seattle-based company at $250 million, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. While most AI solutions focus on searching and summarizing information using large language models (LLMs), Bridgetown Research develops AI agents that gather proprietary data from experts and customer surveys. These agents analyze the data to identify patterns and generate insights, aiding executives and investors in making strategic decisions. With the latest fundraise, Bridgetown plans to invest further in training AI agents or bots to perform a broader set of analyses and enhance access to sector-specific intelligence through partnerships. The company, which initially focused on private equity deal screening, has expanded to encompass a broader range of market research services. The startup was founded by Harsh Sahai, who previously led machine learning teams at e-commerce giant Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab and served as the engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. Reporting by Priyanka.G in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

AI Startup Bridgetown Research Raises $19 Million in Latest Funding

(Reuters) - Artificial Intelligence startup Bridgetown Research said on Wednesday it had raised $19 million in a funding round led by venture capital firms Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel, with participation from a leading research university. The Series A funding round valued the Seattle-based company at $250 million, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. While most AI solutions focus on searching and summarizing information using large language models (LLMs), Bridgetown Research develops AI agents that gather proprietary data from experts and customer surveys. These agents analyze the data to identify patterns and generate insights, aiding executives and investors in making strategic decisions. With the latest fundraise, Bridgetown plans to invest further in training AI agents or bots to perform a broader set of analyses and enhance access to sector-specific intelligence through partnerships. The company, which initially focused on private equity deal screening, has expanded to encompass a broader range of market research services. The startup was founded by Harsh Sahai, who previously led machine learning teams at e-commerce giant Amazon.com and served as the engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. (Reporting by Priyanka.G in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)

SaaS startup Bridgetown Research raises $19 million in funding round led by Lightspeed and Accel

Bridgetown Research, a Seattle-based SaaS startup, raised $19 million from Lightspeed and Accel to enhance AI-driven business analysis. It provides rapid, cost-effective strategic insights, competing with consulting firms and report generators, primarily serving US and UK clients.Software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Bridgetown Research has raised $19 million in a funding round led by global venture capital firms Lightspeed and Accel. The funds will be used to enhance the training of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to handle a wider variety of analyses across diverse domains, to strengthen the R&D team, and to grow partnerships. "The market is already huge and is served by two types of companies: large consulting firms, where you have to pay $1 million for a month, and off-the-shelf report generators, who will send you a report for $5,000," cofounder and chief executive Harsh Sahai told ET. "There isn't much in between, so the penetration is actually quite low. As a result, many companies can't afford strategic advice." Founded in 2024, the Seattle-headquartered company uses AI agents to collect proprietary data and analyse it to help clients make strategic business decisions. It also has voice bots trained to recruit and interview industry experts, gathering primary data that is analysed alongside alternative data from its partners. "You can get a response in as little as 24 hours for simpler questions. For more complex questions, it can take anywhere from two to five days," Sahai said. "If you compare that to how much time and effort you would spend on your own, that's easily 3x shorter," he said. It caters to clients in consulting firms, private equity firms, and large corporate teams specialising in mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts. "We largely serve clients through two separate models: one is direct partnerships or direct sales, and the second is through distribution channels," said Sahai. "So far, we've mostly focused on large funds and large consulting firms, but we're hoping to democratise it and make sure it's accessible to businesses of any size." According to Sahai, 95% of the company's revenue comes from the US and the UK. Commenting on the investment, Ishaan Preet Singh, investor at Lightspeed, said, "Companies are built on the quality of strategic decisions, and the research and analysis behind it. Bridgetown Research enables the smartest executives and investors to make these decisions with a magnitude and at a pace that was earlier impossible." "We are excited to partner with Harsh, who, with his background as an ace AI research scientist-turned-management consultant, blends a unique combination of skills and insights needed to imagine this whole new category of applied AI," said Anagh Prasad, investor at Accel.

Bridgetown Research raises $19M to speed up due diligence with AI | TechCrunch

Due diligence is a costly business, and not just in the realm of investing. Even for a company trying to launch a new product or explore a partnership, finding the right data and doing the research can take weeks and get very costly if they are to make an educated decision -- especially when third party agencies and consultants get involved. A new AI startup called Bridgetown Research says it can make a dent in that cost base and speed up the process by using AI agents that can do most of the data collection and research work that goes into due diligence. And as part of this effort, the startup recently raised $19 million in a Series A round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed. Co-founded in December 2023 by its CEO Harsh Sahai, a former McKinsey employee and research scientist at Amazon, Bridgetown Research has built three types of AI agents that it claims can gather information, collate and condense that data, and finally present it in an easy-to-read format. Bridgetown is exploiting the very networks that consultants and researchers often use to gather insights: networks of industry experts who can provide insights on a particular company or sector. The startup essentially partners with these expert networks, and then uses its AI voice agent to interview experts for the information the company needs to find for its clients. "Because insiders don't have to schedule a call with a human being, they can log on whenever and have a conversation," Sahai said in an interview. "Instead of talking to one senior executive, you can talk to mid-tenure people, but a lot more of them... at a much higher scale." Bridgetown's second set of agents then use large-language models (LLMs) alongside tools for clustering and regression to interpret the data collected by the voice agents, and pass this information back to the LLMs to summarize the answers. Finally, the third set of agents uses small-language models to reproduce the interpretation in a digestible form, like a presentation. Using these agents, the startup says it can produce an initial due diligence analysis in 24 hours with inputs from hundreds of respondents. Sahai said clients can either use Bridgetown's agents to gather data and insights on their own, or they can hire an independent consultant or a small consulting firm to work with the agents to get the same quality of analysis as they would from firms like McKinsey or Bain. That sounds appealing, but large language models and the AI agents built on top of them still tend to hallucinate -- they tend to just make up information. So how is an investor to trust research reproduced by an AI agent? Sahai says the startup addresses this with its "steerability and auditability" approach. This means, he explained, clients can review the data and trace every step the agent took to arrive at its conclusions, similar to the "reasoning" AI models out there. Additionally, the voice agents record their conversations with the experts they interview so that the information can be manually verified. He added that the AI agents do not rely on a single data source. Instead, they gather information from multiple sources, interpret it using large language models, and then employ fine-tuned models to process the data. "We haven't seen our approach before," Sahai said. "Most platforms leave it to you to collect the information you need, and then they will process it on your behalf." Bridgetown isn't the first to tackle this opportunity to make due diligence easier -- we already have startups like Mako AI and DiligentIQ in the space. However, Sahai thinks other platforms do not provide a complete enough solution. Bridgetown Research has two customers in the U.K. and a dozen in the U.S. These include top-tier private equity and venture capital funds, consulting firms, and big corporations that address the M&A pipeline, Sahai said.