Forty years ago Joe Mansueto sorted mutual fund reports on his apartment floor and decided regular people deserved the same research Wall Street kept for itself. The five-star rating that came out of it now shapes how trillions of dollars get invested.
Clarum is a San Francisco AI startup (YC W24) building the intelligence layer for private capital. It began as an AI associate that compresses private-equity due diligence from weeks into minutes, letting firms upload data rooms and questionnaires and get transparent, sourced answers to hundreds of questions. It has since broadened toward structuring a firm's proprietary documents - deal memos, diligence notes, returns data - into a unified model that AI agents can query, so investors can finally ask cross-portfolio questions that were previously buried in files.
Cohesion is a New York-based Y Combinator (P26) startup building AI agents that automate research for institutional investors. Its agentic teammate monitors the companies an analyst covers - tracking earnings, news, and non-traditional datasets like podcasts and X/Twitter - and surfaces differentiated insights purpose-built for public equity investing. Founded by ex-hedge-fund analyst Devon Krapcho with engineers from AWS and T. Rowe Price, Cohesion is already live with 10+ long/short and long-only fundamental funds managing a combined $10B+ in assets.
DiligenceSquared is a New York AI company that automates commercial due diligence for investors. Its AI agents run expert interviews with customers, competitors, and market specialists, then synthesize the findings into interactive reports where every claim links back to a source transcript. Founded by two ex-Blackstone and ex-BCG private equity operators plus a former Google engineer, it delivers consulting-grade market research for a fraction of the $500K-$1M that firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG typically charge.
Nitrogen, formerly Riskalyze, is an Auburn, California wealth-management software company that helps financial advisors grow their firms. It invented the Risk Number, a way to quantify an investor's risk tolerance and align it with their portfolio, and has expanded into a connected suite covering proposal generation, investment research, financial planning, client engagement, compliance and AI-assisted advisor workflows. More than five million investors have received a Risk Number, and the platform snaps into the gap between a firm's marketing, CRM and asset platforms to create a consistent client experience.
Menos AI is a San Jose-based, AI-native fintech building institutional-grade artificial intelligence for hedge funds and asset managers. Founded in 2024 by a team of quant and AI practitioners, its flagship product Sonar is an intelligent research agent that uses proprietary Alpha Signal Extraction technology to surface timely, differentiated investment ideas from the flood of financial data. The company raised a $5.2M oversubscribed seed round in 2025 and positions its platform as an augmentation layer for investment teams - secure, auditable, and designed to integrate with existing workflows rather than replace the humans who use it.
Estimize is a financial estimates platform that crowdsources earnings-per-share and revenue forecasts from a community of more than 120,000 contributors - including buy-side, sell-side and independent analysts, students, academics and private investors. By aggregating and weighting these estimates, Estimize produces a consensus that has repeatedly proven more accurate and more timely than the traditional Wall Street sell-side consensus, and sells that data to hedge funds, asset managers and quantitative researchers. Since 2021 it has operated as part of alternative-data and quant research firm ExtractAlpha.
Raylu is a New York-based AI company building an AI-native deal origination platform for private-market investors. It turns an investment thesis into a custom market map, enriched company intelligence, and verified founder outreach in minutes rather than weeks - work that traditionally takes analysts days. Used by 45+ funds representing over $500B in AUM, Raylu raised an $8M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to $12M.