Portrait Analytics, a Boston-based fintech startup working to bring generative AI to investment research, announced Thursday it raised $7 million in fresh funding. The financing was led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from existing investor .406 Ventures and several unnamed hedge fund professionals, and brings Portrait’s total capital raised to $10 million.
Founded in 2022 by a former principal at hedge fund Baupost Group and a handful of AI leaders from Amazon, Twitter and Bloomberg, Portrait is on a mission to upend investment research — a process that remains largely “manual and full of friction,” according to CEO David Plon. These days, analysts have to spend an inordinate amount of time sifting through massive quantities of financial data in order to extract important insights and build an investment thesis.
Portrait aims to solve that problem with its AI-enabled platform, which offers what the startup calls an “idea generation tool” that sorts through thousands of companies to find the most potent ideas for their investment goals. Once a company of interest is identified, the platform provides a summary of comprehensive research on that company. Analysts can also ask the platform’s generative AI tool specific research questions. Essentially, Portrait allows analysts to quickly learn about a particular sector, generate informed investment theses, and increase their research bandwidth.
The emergence of generative AI has been a game-changer for industries across the board, including finance, with companies big and small integrating language models like ChatGPT into their workflows. But ChatGPT and its contemporaries don’t have the domain expertise or data to meet the needs of business applications. That’s why companies like Portrait are building their own generative AI tools.
“AI has the potential to act as a bandwidth multiplier but that won’t be achieved by simply bolting ChatGPT onto existing products and data flows,” Plon said in a statement. “The AI-powered application that will make this future a reality will need to have deep expertise on how to think like a well-trained analyst, be delivered in a UX that fits neatly into the analyst workflow, and above all else, be factual and trustworthy. This is precisely what we’re building at Portrait.”
Portrait’s platform is in private beta with select asset managers right now. In the coming months, the company plans to make it available to asset managers on their waitlist.
