The industries that software overlooked may get the most out of AI. For the last fifteen years, SaaS companies mostly went after buyers that were easy to reach and quick to sign. Industries that were specialized or slow to buy were left behind, even large ones doing important work.
Companies that went all in on SaaS now have to fit AI into the tools and habits their people already depend on. Industries that never got those tools can skip that step and start with software built around AI from the beginning, as long as someone is willing to build it for them. Institutional capital is one of the best examples we know of.
Pensions, endowments, foundations, hospital systems, and insurers invest money that has to last for decades. It pays retirees, funds research, and keeps hospitals running. Yet most financial software was built for banks, trading desks, and asset managers. The investment teams at these institutions were seen as too small or too specialized to be worth it.
A few people at one of these institutions can be responsible for billions of dollars. Most of what they need to know shows up as PDF statements from their fund managers, and the systems they use don’t talk to each other. Every quarter, someone reads each statement, pulls out the numbers, checks them against the last one, and types them into a spreadsheet before the board sees anything.
AI can do much more for these teams than the software they missed. SaaS would have given them a better place to keep their data. AI can do a lot of the work itself. It’s multiplayer, too, so the CIO, the investment staff, finance, and the board are all looking at the same numbers. That frees a small team to spend its time on investment decisions, and better decisions mean more money for pensions, research, and patient care.
Most of these institutions are making this change over the same few years, and whatever they choose now, they’ll likely be using for a long time.
Finpilot is building that software for them. Today, the company announced a $10M Series A led by Lobby Capital, and we’re investing again after leading the seed in 2024.
Finpilot is building the system these teams run on. It brings everything an institution knows into one place, from its portfolio and documents to its meetings and research, and runs AI agents on top of it. The agents do the work: researching managers, preparing analysis and reports, running diligence, and keeping watch on every position. They work in the background and bring people in when a decision needs their judgment, so the team can spend its time on decisions instead of gathering information.
It also picks up how each team works, so it gets more useful the longer they use it. Seattle Children’s, Children’s Health of Dallas, Hackensack Meridian Health, TIFF, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the Wyoming Retirement System use Finpilot today. They’re very different organizations, but their investment teams had the same problem, and very few companies were trying to solve it.
Lakshay Chauhan has worked in machine learning since 2016 and built core ML and quant research at Euclidean before starting Finpilot. He understood early that AI is only useful in finance if the numbers underneath it are right, so he spent the first stretch getting the data in order, even though that’s not the part that shows well in a demo. He also chose to build for a customer most of the industry had passed over, and many of those customers now help shape the product. Since we first invested, he has taken Finpilot from a research tool for analysts to software that whole investment teams work in, and he has grown the team along the way. Finpilot is hiring across product, engineering, sales, marketing, and client success, and you can reach them at [email protected].
We’re glad to keep working with Lakshay and the Finpilot team as more of these institutions make the switch toward an AI-powered future.
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