Arkifi raises over $9 million for AI-powered financial analyst tools

Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co

21/08/2023 13:00

By Anna Tong
       Aug 21 - Arkifi, an artificial-intelligence startup that
provides workflow automation tools for financial institutions
including hedge funds and investment banks, said on Monday the
company had raised over $9 million in seed financing.
    The financing was co-led by Khosla Ventures  KVSA.O  and
Nyca Partners, with participation from Soma Capital, MVP
Ventures, Valiant Capital Employee Fund, Correlation VC and G&H
Partners.
    Palo Alto, California-based Arkifi says its products can
perform many of the functions that form the bread and butter of
a financial analyst’s day, including information retrieval on
public markets, building financial models and customizing
spreadsheets. In addition, Arkifi does not hallucinate, a term
for when AI models make up false information, said Chief
Executive Officer Hesam Motlagh. Arkifi will also build a
plug-in for the Microsoft  MSFT.O  365 Copilot AI product.
    Since Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched the ChatGPT chatbot
which created a sensation, global enterprises have been racing
to figure out how to use generative AI to make company workflows
more efficient.
    “It’s a classic example of what will happen in many, many
industries,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “You
take a function where there is a lot of grunt work and the AI
does that work for you, so you can spend more time thinking and
doing the more creative stuff.”
    Arkifi said its customers include large financial
institutions, though it declined to identify any. On Monday, the
company opened a public waitlist.
    Motlagh said that Arkifi can replace much of the work that
junior financial analysts, typically new college graduates,
perform, such as pulling public company information and
formatting spreadsheets.
    “In the long run, this will disintermediate some human
labor,” he said.

 (Anna Tong in San Francisco
Editing by Matthew Lewis)
 ((anna.tong@thomsonreuters.com; Mob: +1-650-468-3913))