2023 has been a landmark year for Auquan, where we’re taking the world’s unstructured data and turning it into actionable intelligence for our financial services customers. We raised a round of funding, launched our SaaS-based Intelligence Engine product built on retrieval augmented generation (RAG AI), gained significant new customers and industry recognition, and began to change how the industry thinks about AI, non-financial investment risks, and ESG.
Significant new customers and growth
It’s customer first at Auquan, so let’s start there! In 2023, we attracted a number of industry-leading new customers, including Federated Hermes, BC Partners, and a European asset management firm with more than $1T in assets under management.
“Auquan’s Intelligence Engine gives us peripheral vision over all of our portfolio holdings and helps us evaluate potential investments, providing valuable insurance against company-specific risks. With Auquan’s new Prompt Intelligence capability, I gain an immediate awareness of potential issues bubbling under the surface without having to know what I’m looking for ahead of time or wait for coverage to get built.” — Inez Ling, Amati Global Investors
Let’s look at why customers are adopting Auquan.
Launching Auquan’s Intelligence Engine built on RAG AI
In October, we announced the availability of our Intelligence Engine SaaS product — the only solution for financial services that leverages RAG AI, a cutting-edge AI technique designed to handle the kinds of knowledge-intensive tasks that financial services demand. Highlights include:
- Comprehensive outputs for private markets: Access detailed diligence reports, industry research, investment memos, impact rationales, and UNSDGs alignment, all within one unified platform.
- Beyond traditional data: Explore beyond traditional news - you can selectively browse lawsuits, regulatory databases, trade journals, and even customer and employee reviews for unparalleled insights into company and market dynamics.
- Advanced theme search: Broaden your research beyond companies. Instantly uncover information on any trend or topic with a simple word/phrase of interest.
- Efficient risk summaries: Get rapid summaries on companies and assets to identify critical issues and opportunities in a glance, bringing even more efficiency to your research. Summaries are enabled by RAG (retrieval augmented generation) and compliant with UNGC, UNGP, OECD, and other frameworks
- Multilingual support: Search for information in even more languages - top 30 countries by GDP or where key supply chains exist.
- In-platform information: Stuck with paywalls? View licensed content directly within Auquan, bypassing those pesky barriers.
Read more about Auquan’s Intelligence Engine and RAG AI here (or in Environmental Finance, SiliconAngle, or AiThority).
Delivering Prompt Intelligence with real-time noise filtering and severity marking
We announced in November our Prompt Intelligence capability — the first and only capability that can generate equity, credit, risk or impact intelligence on any company worldwide — regardless of whether prior coverage exists. Read more about it here.
There are two key components that make Prompt Intelligence possible: real time noise filtering and severity marking.
To filter out noisy data so our customers are focusing only on what matters, we use an AI model trained to assess whether documents fetched in real time are relevant for a given user and their use case — or junk!
Our Large Language Model (LLM)-powered real-time severity marking enables our Intelligence Engine to assign a severity rating to an issue with a high degree of accuracy — within seconds. This means our users have a short list of highly relevant and impactful news articles or other documents for any company in the world in real time.
Generating the due diligence reports financial services needs
While our customers never miss a risk or opportunity with Auquan’s Intelligence Engine, they also need comprehensive and up-to-date due diligence reports to effectively evaluate companies, their risks and ESG performance, and to meet anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-business (KYB) legal requirements.
These kinds of reports have traditionally taken days or weeks to produce, whether internally or externally via a service provider.
At Auquan, we’ve invested in the ability to produce due diligence reports on demand automatically, with only human analyst reviews needed. Not only are Auquan’s reports far more comprehensive than what’s available in the market, we can produce them in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. And they look stunning!
Auquan’s due diligence reports feature a summary page showing risk areas for a company and how they’ve developed over time, along with a detailed deep dive into each risk that includes summaries, key stories, and other important information, such as relevant lawsuits or regulatory actions.
Attracting investment
The Auquan team wouldn’t have been able to accomplish so much in 2023 without the support of our amazing customers — and investors!
In October, we announced the closing of our $3.5 million seed round, led by early-stage investor Neotribe Ventures, with participation from Episode 1 and Stage 2 Capital.
“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
Looking ahead to 2024
Further customer empowerment, continued innovation with RAG AI, and industry education will continue to serve as the pillars of Auquan’s product roadmap and growth strategy in 2024.
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