NEW YORK: Multiplier, an AI company making agent harnesses for asset managers, has raised a $6 million seed financing round. The round was led by Lux Capital with participation from Y Combinator, GoAhead Ventures, Rebel Fund, General Advance, Unpopular Ventures, and Amino Capital. Additional investors include Greg Jensen and Karen Karniol-Tambour (co-CIOs, Bridgewater Associates), Pete Briger (Chairman, Fortress Investment Group), Jasjeet Sekhon (CSO, DeepMind), Sandeep Nailwal (CEO, Polygon), Kaz Nejatian (CEO, OpenDoor), and Multiplier customers (especially Mercator Partners).

“We tried nearly every tool on the market and ended up with an unwieldy collection of fragmented point solutions,” said Michael Siliciano, co-founder of California hedge fund Verso Partners. “We’ve also attempted to build our own tools, but maintaining them became a full-time job. That’s why we brought in Multiplier.”

Multiplier is the via media between hobbled software and duct-taped DIY AI efforts for leading asset management firms.

“Early vertical tools have grown fast,” said Ian McInnis, Multiplier’s co-founder and CEO. “‘ChatGPT, but for finance, and it has some data access, and it’s compliant.’ Okay, great.” Architectural and product decisions that helped others move faster have left investment management firms unprepared for the agentic era.

“You still need domain specialization, but you also need firm specialization,” said McInnis. “Your data access demands are now ‘all the data, information, and context that I as a human can access and then some,’ whether or not the providers have built nice MCPs. Now that the AI’s getting woven so deeply into your firm, your security demands go way beyond compliance box-ticking. Investors are legitimately concerned about their edge being stolen. All these demands are difficult to satisfy on webapps.”

Multiplier meets those demands with repeatable infrastructure: it deploys the same substrate inside each customer’s own systems, then builds firm-specific customizations on top. Every firm needs that substrate, but frameworks, info sources, processes, and tastes necessarily differ, so Multiplier builds bespoke evals for each firm it works with. “For the time being, that’s what it takes,” said McInnis. “Without evals, your AI drifts whenever you try to do any kind of continual learning, gets kind of crufty and dumb. It slips back into pretraining biases. Those biases are also why you need investor oversight when building evals.”

McInnis was an investor at Bridgewater Associates until February, and COO Ryan Winkler left StepStone Group in April. CTO/President Ben Finch–––formerly founding researcher at AI unicorn Sentient Labs–––brought the group together at Princeton University to start a student-run hedge fund, which has beaten the S&P 500 every year.

Users spend many hours daily in the product, which expedites everything from top-of-funnel idea generation to post-trade review. “The most valuable dataset inside an asset manager is not the market data everyone can buy, but the firm’s accumulated research, judgment, and decision history,” said Phil Brady of GoAhead Ventures. “Multiplier provides the missing connective tissue.”

Long/short investment manager Mercator Partners helped to incubate Multiplier, betting on the team before a product existed. Martin Fransson, head of primary research at Mercator Partners, described Multiplier as “a tremendous internal proprietary knowledge flywheel.” Scott Hobart, CIO of Mercator Partners, said, “We used to spend 80% of our time gathering information and 20% acting on it. Multiplier has flipped those percentages.”

The first check was written by Greg Jensen, who also invested early in OpenAI and wrote Anthropic’s first outside check. Jensen, Managing Chief Investment Officer of Bridgewater’s Alpha Engine (its flagship human-managed fund) and of AIA Labs (its AI-managed fund), said he was “impressed and excited by what the Multiplier team is building.” Jas Sekhon, Chief Strategy Officer of Google DeepMind, said “I've spent enough time arguing about AI with Ian, I knew I had to invest.”

The capital raise will enable Multiplier to become the new operating system for investors.

Multiplier was previously known as WithAI. It has been renamed to better express the founders’ intent to “multiply great investors” rather than replacing them with AI.

Fonte: Business Wire