Auquan’s seed round and deploying retrieval augmented regeneration (RAG) for financial services

Last week marked a major milestone for Auquan — and for our financial services customers. We announced the close of our $3.5m seed round, led by Neotribe Ventures, with participation from Episode 1 and Stage 2 Capital. We’re grateful to have committed investors as partners who believe in our mission and our ability to execute on it.  

We also formally announced our flagship Intelligence Engine SaaS product, which employs retrieval augmented regeneration (RAG AI) to extract hidden insights from massive volumes of unstructured data to power private and public company due diligence, ESG research and compliance, and ongoing controversy and risk monitoring.

Read more about our news in SiliconAngle, FinTechGlobal, Environmental Finance, and AiThority.  

The world of finance is awash with vast amounts of unstructured data that hides important insights, but while generative AI might seem like a great solution for finding these insights, has fallen far short for financial services — and enterprise in general — because they can’t access domain-specific data and often fabricates responses. 

Originally developed by Meta, RAG AI is a groundbreaking innovation created to tackle the kinds of knowledge-intensive tasks that financial services demand. RAG AI combines the power of AI-driven information retrieval systems and generative AI, representing a “major breakthrough for making generative AI viable for knowledge-intensive tasks in the enterprise,” according to Auquan co-founder and CEO Chandini Jain. 

Read our white paper: The Advantages of RAG AI (Retrieval Augmented Generation) Over Generative AI for Financial Services.

As the only solution for financial services that’s powered by RAG AI, Auquan’s Intelligence Engine is empowering finance professionals to refocus their time from mundane tasks to analyzing insights and making strategic decisions faster. Some of the largest asset managers, investment banks, and private equity funds in the U.S. and Europe have already deployed Auquan, including Federated Hermes, UBS, and Amati Global Investors.

“Auquan’s product surfaces valuable ‘unknown unknowns’ for our emerging market portfolios without requiring us to search. Auquan’s ability to identify hidden information in local languages from noisy data that other tools often overlook has enhanced our in-house research and saved us a considerable amount of time we would otherwise spend managing all of this data.” — Kunjal Gala, head of global emerging markets at Federated Hermes.

“It’s rare to see a shift as significant as AI. Auquan is uniquely positioned to leverage RAG in order to make generative AI viable for financial services and help firms unlock the value of the world’s unstructured data. We’re thrilled about the future in partnering with the Auquan team as they continue to innovate and expand on their vision.” — Rebecca Mitchem, partner at Neotribe Ventures and co-leader of Ignite, Neotribe’s growth-stage fund

Financial Services Use Cases

Auquan simplifies financial services processes that involve collecting and processing large amounts of unstructured text, such as company reports, regulatory documents, broker research, legal filings, and news coverage.

• Private company pre-screening and due diligence. Private equity and debt firms can gain a competitive advantage by screening potential investments quickly and efficiently. Auquan provides detailed insights on over a half million private and public companies worldwide, enabling customers to access previously unavailable data and analyze important details about potential investments, such as industry, products, growth potential, management team, and hidden reputational and ESG risks.
  
  
• Know your customer (KYC) and background checks. Regulatory compliance is time and resource-intensive, involving the collection, verification, and evaluation of information from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources. Auquan automates information retrieval from verified sources, summarizes data, and provides real-time risk monitoring and alerting to streamline KYC and background checks while improving accuracy and comprehensiveness.
  
  
• ESG and sustainability research and monitoring. Sustainability evaluations are important for investment decisions and are now regulated. Auquan's Intelligence Engine analyzes historical data and tracks real-time developments to find greenwashing, ESG issues, conduct risks, and hidden controversies in supply chains. Auquan matches incidents with global industry frameworks like SFDR (PAI), SDGs, SASB, and UNGC for easy and accurate reporting.

The future of retrieval augmented regeneration (RAG) for financial services

With a fresh round of funding from great investors and a growing list of amazing customers, Auquan is doubling down on innovating with RAG AI to transform how financial services organizations tackle company and entity intelligence. 

Stay tuned, because we’re just getting started, and we’ve got a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline.