BOSTON, April 06, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Portrait Analytics, developer of the leading generative AI research platform for investment analysts, has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding. The financing was led by .406 Ventures with participation from partners at leading hedge funds.
Public market investors have long been burdened by information overload. In an industry where speed and timing matters, analysts spend hundreds of hours per year reading thousands of documents in order to research companies and stay current on their coverage area. Portrait’s platform dramatically accelerates the speed at which investors can discover and become experts on companies, and produce high-quality research.
Portrait’s first product is a Q&A-based application that incorporates both generative AI search and summarization to serve public market analysts. Portrait responds to users’ tasks by extracting and synthesizing key information buried in company filings to produce crisp and factual responses that are fully auditable by users. Eventually, Portrait will be able to perform any task asked of a junior investment analyst, including suggesting ideas, building financial models, and writing memos and pitch decks.
“In my nearly five years as an analyst at Baupost, I never felt like I had enough time to research all the companies that came across my desk or turn over all the stones I wanted to when digging into a thesis,” said David Plon, Portrait Analytics’ Co-founder and CEO. “At Portrait, we’re building the personal research assistant I always wish I had, one that would massively expand my bandwidth for finding and consuming information critical to the investment research process.”
“Like so many great companies, Portrait Analytics was founded by an entrepreneur looking to harness disruptive technology to solve a long-standing business problem, one that he has actually lived,” said Liam Donohue, Co-founder and Managing Partner at .406 Ventures. “In the course of our due diligence, we talked to dozens of investment analysts who detailed the painstaking and inefficient process of researching companies. Over and again, they lamented the lack of a technology solution that could help them make better decisions faster. It quickly became obvious that the experience, expertise and vision that David and his team bring to building Portrait will be transformative in solving this massive and important problem.”
Portrait was co-founded in 2022 by Plon, a former principal on the public markets team at Baupost, and Connell Gough, a full stack developer with extensive search experience who also leads Portrait’s engineering team. Portrait’s founding engineering team also includes an accomplished PhD ML research engineer and a full-stack developer and former founder.
Portrait’s platform is in private beta, with plans to release access to analysts on its waiting list in the coming months. To learn more about Portrait Analytics, please visit portrait-analytics.com.
About Portrait Analytics
Portrait Analytics’ mission is to accelerate and deepen powerful investment research through building a generative AI research assistant for every investor. The company was co-founded by a chronically time-strapped buyside investor at The Baupost Group who sought a better way to efficiently consume data from filings, transcripts, and research. With this goal in mind, Portrait leverages state-of-the-art machine learning applications to search, summarize, and synthesize investment content for analysts. Portrait Analytics is backed by .406 Ventures and partners at leading global hedge funds. To learn more, please visit www.portrait-analytics.
