At eight or nine years old, Thomas Samuelson offered his grandfather a stock tip: buy Exxon. The future finance executive had another ambition too - professional football - but markets proved to be the more durable game. They supplied the uniforms, rivalries and scoreboards, with the added theatrical flourish that the rules could change while everyone was still playing.
Samuelson would spend more than three decades inside that game. He worked in investment banking, international trading, asset management and private equity. His public career includes senior roles at Crédit Agricole, Bear Stearns and CLSA, then a dozen years managing global basic-materials and emerging-market investments at George Weiss Associates. He invested in more than 500 companies across more than 30 countries. The geography was expansive: Latin America, Asia, Russia and other developing markets where a tidy spreadsheet rarely survives first contact with the ground.
Yet one frustration kept following him from meeting to meeting. Companies needed investors. Investors needed company information. The machinery connecting them remained stubbornly indirect - broker introductions, scheduled roadshows, research notes, newswire blasts and crowded email inboxes. The official facts were public, but access to context and people could still feel like a private club with a receptionist who had gone to lunch.
The expensive distance between two people
Samuelson has described himself as the investor who wanted to meet companies, not brokers. It is a small distinction with a large business model hiding inside it. Corporate access was traditionally supplied by the sell side: banks arranged meetings, analysts filtered information and relationships determined who sat in the room. That system could serve large institutions well. Smaller public companies and individual investors often found themselves standing in the corridor.
His response was BRON Investor Network, a platform for direct, compliant communication between listed companies and investors. The name means “bridge” in Swedish, an unusually literal piece of branding. BRON gathered press releases, statements and other issuer material, then paired the content with tools for communication. Samuelson compared the aggregation model to Expedia or Zillow: the usefulness came from putting scattered information in one intelligible place.
“I was focused on the companies and tried to build tools to help the companies, and also help investors make direct connections.”
There was a regulatory wrinkle. Public companies cannot treat investor conversation like a casual group chat. Messages may need to be archived, material disclosures must be handled consistently and convenience cannot outrank compliance. BRON tried to make direct access compatible with those obligations. The aim was not intimacy for its own sake. It was a better route for official information.
Samuelson brought an institutional résumé to the problem. He led Magellan Yates, advised exchanges on corporate access, spoke about MiFID II and served as an independent director on the board of Mexican homebuilder Urbi, including its Audit and Corporate Practices Committee. Beginning in 2015, he also taught as an adjunct lecturer at NYU Stern. He had seen investor communication from the trading desk, the portfolio, the board and the classroom. Each viewpoint offered a fresh angle on the same oddity: the market prized information, then tolerated remarkably clumsy ways of delivering it.
A bridge learns to speak
In 2024, BRON needed a stronger technology stack. That search ended in a merger with Reap, a platform built by engineer Gustavo Chiechelski and product designer Matt Costa. Samuelson joined them as co-founder and CEO. BRON contributed relationships and a map of the investor-relations problem. Reap contributed the technical foundation. The product moved from organizing information toward answering questions about it.
The current Reap suite has four connected parts. Its IR Assistant uses company-approved documents to answer investor questions across websites, the Reap app, WhatsApp and other channels. Insights analyzes those conversations for themes, sentiment and gaps. Targeting ranks prospective institutional investors by financial fit, market presence and investment style. Events lets investors submit questions before and during company sessions, with AI-drafted responses reviewed by the IR team.
The Reap information loop
The clever part is not merely that the software talks. Financial software has been producing chat bubbles with impressive enthusiasm. Reap's more consequential rule is what happens when the facts run out. The assistant is meant to stay within official company content, show its supporting material and acknowledge when it lacks enough information. In a category where a fabricated number can become a legal problem before lunch, refusal is not a failure of charm. It is the product doing its job.
In high-trust software, the boundary of an answer can matter as much as the speed of one.
That design also mirrors Samuelson's older argument about access. If the information comes directly from a company, the investor should not have to wonder which anonymous corner of the internet supplied it. The issuer gains control over the source material. The investor gains a faster route through it. The system becomes useful precisely because it declines to play oracle.
The inbox, accused
Samuelson's public writing has a recurring villain: email. He argues that institutional investors can receive thousands of messages a day, leaving earnings releases and company updates to compete in an information abyss. Newswires prove that something was distributed, but not that it landed in a useful human mind. The habit persists partly because compliance workflows reward the act of sending. Attention, sadly, has never respected a distribution receipt.
His proposed alternative has changed with the available technology. In 2019 he pressed investor-relations teams to use more video. By 2022 and 2023, he was making the case for social media as an instrument of disclosure, reach and two-way engagement. With Reap, the argument has moved again: let investors ask for the specific fact they need, in their own language and on the channel they already use.
The generational observation is straightforward. Younger investors grew up with search bars, trading apps and instant replies. They are unlikely to excavate a corporate website, call a broker and wait three days for an answer if another experience is available. Samuelson's line is characteristically impatient: “They want instant information, and they want it now.” Reap says its assistant operates in more than 60 languages, making “now” less dependent on where the shareholder happens to live.
The investor-relations website used to behave like a filing cabinet. Samuelson wants it to behave like a well-briefed conversation.
Reputation before velocity
For all his enthusiasm about speed, Samuelson talks about entrepreneurship in older terms. On a 2023 podcast he emphasized credibility, character, patience and perseverance. Exchange partnerships took time. Corporate relationships depended on the reputation accumulated during his finance career. He also described initially self-funding BRON as a personal mistake: control came with added risk and headaches, and the company later accepted seed capital.
That is the useful tension in his story. The product promises immediacy; the founder's path was built slowly. A network cannot be rushed simply because its interface can. Public companies entrust a platform with controlled information, investors must believe the answers and exchanges put their names beside relationships. Software ships in versions. Credibility does not.
The 2024 merger was another practical expression of that view. Rather than pretend BRON already possessed every technical capability it needed, Samuelson combined it with a team that had them. Chiechelski and Costa brought engineering and product experience. Samuelson brought customers, exchange relationships and an unusually long memory of how capital markets behave when technology meets incentives. The union turned a bridge into a suite.
By mid-2025, Reap said it was working with clients in seven countries. Samuelson set a goal of reaching more than 50 within five years. The geographical ambition fits a career spent in emerging markets and a product whose multilingual design matters most when capital, companies and shareholders do not share a postcode.
The second question
The promise of AI in investor relations can sound grand until it is reduced to an ordinary scene. A shareholder has a question about revenue by division. An IR officer has already disclosed the answer somewhere inside a report. The shareholder cannot find it. The officer does not have time to reply individually. A useful system brings the two together, cites the official material and leaves the speculative flourish at home.
Samuelson's career has been a long study of that gap. At nine, the problem was simple enough to solve across a kitchen table: name the stock and make the pitch. Wall Street added layers, some necessary and some merely well-upholstered. BRON tried to shorten the route. Reap is trying to make the route responsive.
He remains expansive about the outcome. He has written that companies and investors who embrace AI will lead a change in financial markets. The sober version of that aspiration is more interesting. If Reap works as intended, a public company will learn what investors actually want to know, an investor will spend less time hunting through documents and both sides will meet around an answer that can be checked.
Finance has never suffered from a shortage of people willing to speak with confidence. A platform that knows when to speak, where the fact came from and when to stop may be the more modern invention. Samuelson has spent 30 years trying to get companies and investors into the same room. This time, the room has a text box.