Google’s large investments in Artificial Intelligence is followed by a similar direction taken by its parent company Alphabet. Alphabet, the American conglomerate, has been investing in startups in the tech industry. Its corporate data firm AlphaSense just secured another $100 million, making its way up to a valuation of $1.8 billion.
With competitors like Bloomberg and FactSet, AlphaSense provides data to companies that guide corporate and financial strategies. As a Search Engine, its use is specialized and catered to the corporate world of tech.
Since the blow up of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, more multinational giants are investing in the technology to upgrade their search engines. These systems use LLMs, or large language models, that generate text and ‘talk’ to you.
Based on NLP, these interactive systems allow for quicker search and improve the computer-interface, automating tasks that take precious human hours. Released in February, Google’s Bard will integrate with its parent company’s AlphaSense to become the dominant search engine.
CEO Jack Kokko says this new integration will make it easier to summarize financial documents to highlight key points and takeaways. Efficient summarization, being the newest successful addition to AI, is now being used as a key factor in GPT platforms to transform research and information across all sectors.
Previous investments into AlphaSense
Last June, Goldmann Sacchs and Viking Global Investors raised $225 million, doubling the 2021 investment from the same parties. This upgrade was made with a feeling of desire as much as a compulsion to keep up with the competitive new technology. In this round, the goal was Generative AI centered as it becomes a trend, especially for large tech-based companies with gigantic amounts of data.
AlphaSense, having a strong backing, is much further along compared to other competitors starting out in the building of their company name and brand image. It earns up to $100 million as annual revenue, as it did last year.
The new investment
CEO Kokko says the funds generated from the new round of investments will go towards hiring more salespeople. These salespeople will help when the company goes public. For now, they’re holding their horses given the current state of the economy. This seemed like the perfect time to make investments in improving the backend of their services. The generative AI will improve the user experience at AlphaSense. By making the interface more intuitive, it attracts the attention of users. We already saw this in the case of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which excited people from all walks of life.
However, AlphaSense will work with more specialized and company-specific data. By creating accurate footnotes to large amounts of data, they plan to revolutionize the process of financial decision-making. Although the specific LLMs AlphaSense will be integrated with are not yet revealed, given the power of this company, we can imagine this is a well protected secret. Kokko said they are testing as many models as possible to create the perfect fit for their database and their purpose.
