While working at Point72, a hedge fund founded by notorious investor Steve Cohen, Thomas Lee realized that the financial industry relied heavily on error-prone manual data entry processes.
“As a buy-side analyst, I found it painful to manually capture and enter data to build and update financial models,” Lee told TechCrunch. “It took time away from more important tasks: analysis and investment.”
After meeting Jeremy Huang, a former software engineer at Airbnb and Meta, and Daniel Chen, a former Microsoft engineer through connections at New York University (all three are alumni), Li ventured into data automation solutions. I have decided to do so. Entry assignment.
Three partners launched Daloopa, which uses AI to extract and organize data from financial reports and investor presentations for analysts. Daloopa announced Tuesday that it has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Touring Capital with participation from Morgan Stanley and Nexus Venture Partners.
“Daloopa is an AI-powered historical data infrastructure for analysts,” said Li. “Approaching the data discovery process this way helps competitive companies and teams stay ahead of the curve.”
Mr. Lee said Dalupa's clients are primarily hedge funds, private equity firms, mutual funds, and corporate and investment banks. They use the startup's tools to build workflows for investment and due diligence research. AI algorithm-powered workflows discover and deliver data to analysts' financial models, reducing the need to manually copy data.
“Daloopa provides a new way to capture mission-critical data for both the buy-side and sell-side,” said Li. “The time saved is reinvested into research and analysis or customer-facing time, helping our customers gain an edge in the research process.”
Now, I'm a little skeptical that Daloopa's AI is infallible. After all, no AI system is perfect. Thanks to a phenomenon known as illusion, it's not uncommon for AI models to fabricate facts and figures when summarizing documents and files.
Mr. Lee did not suggest that Dalupa was foolproof. But he argued that the platform's algorithms “will only continue to improve over time” as they are trained on a growing set of financial documents. The mother will tell you exactly where the data comes from. Mr. Lee says it's a trade secret.
“Daloopa has been an AI company since its inception five years ago, before AI was all the rage,” Lee said. “We have spent years training algorithms and developing AI for financial institutions.”
The new funding brings New York City-based Daloopa's total funding to $40 million, allowing it to expand its team of approximately 300 employees, strengthen product research and development, and expand customer acquisition efforts. I plan to.
“Daloopa is an AI-powered solution that started ahead of its time and has experienced accelerated year-on-year growth over the past two years,” he said. “As financial institutions increasingly deploy AI tools, we are well-positioned as a leader in the AI-driven fundamental data space.”