Kensho, a US company developing a cloud-based intelligent computer system capable of answering complex financial and market research questions posed in natural language, has attracted $10m in a seed round. ‘Warren,’ the company’s virtual market research assistant, is currently being tested by a select set of asset managers and research teams and has attracted capital from investors including General Catalyst, NEA, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, Devonshire Investors-the private equity arm of Fidelity Investments-and other venture capital firms.
Kensho designed Warren to shorten traditional investment research cycles from days to minutes. The system was built by several veteran software engineers from Google Inc. and Apple Inc., including one of the original engineers on the first iPhone team, according to a PR Newswire press statement.
Warren can answer a million distinct types of natural language questions about the impact of global events on asset prices, such as, “What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle East?”
According to Kensho Chief Technology Officer Pete Kruskall and Kensho Lead Engineer Nicolai Krakowiak, both former Google software engineers, Warren will be able to answer 100 million distinct types of complex financial questions by the end of 2014.
Other players in the market of virtual intelligence assistants include Apple (Siri), IBM (Watson), and Google (Now).
Dr. James Shinn, the former National Intelligence Officer for Asia at the Central Intelligence Agency and the former Assistant Secretary for Asia in the U.S. Department of Defense, has joined Kensho’s Advisory Board.
Dr. Shinn said, “Event-driven statistical analysis is a remarkably powerful lens through which to understand the world. The effects of geopolitical events on assets—such as oil prices, currencies, and foreign and domestic equity volatility—is one of the least understood areas and, without technology, is one of the hardest, human-labor intensive, and costliest things to measure, despite clearly having massive effects on these markets.”
David Jegen, Managing Director at Devonshire Investors, the private equity arm of Fidelity Investments, said if the investment, “Active asset management requires constant innovation to stay ahead, and we are just beginning to see how technology will transform existing approaches. Kensho is at the forefront of bringing next-generation technology to help portfolio managers outperform, and we are proud to be part of their team. Since its earliest iterations, Kensho’s software has been adding valuable improvements to the research and portfolio management processes.”
Kensho has a long-standing technology partnership with NASDAQ OMX, and Warren is the first professional-grade financial research and analytics platform built completely on NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, a secure cloud computing platform designed exclusively for the financial services sector.