Bridgetown Research is taking steps to change this narrative – For the simple reason that they don’t happen often enough, strategic business decisions have historically been costly and slow.
The AI decision science startup has raised $19 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed and Accel, with participation from a top research university. Bridgetown Research has created AI agents that conduct research on their own, most notably voice bots trained to recruit and interview industry experts, collecting primary data that can be analysed alongside alternative data sourced from their partners.
Overview Of Bridgetown Research
Bridgetown Research was founded by Harsh Sahai, who managed strategy engagements at McKinsey & Co. after directing machine learning teams at Amazon. Sahai’s basic insight was that most business assessments are a permutation of a few automatable processes. With a wealth of experience in both technology and strategy consulting, the founding team includes former employees from McKinsey, Bain, Amazon, and top tech companies.
According to Harsh Sahai, the founder and CEO of Bridgetown Research: “We are excited to be a catalyst for change. We are working with multiple private equity firms, management consulting firms, and corporate teams to help make strategic decisions better and faster. This, in turn, is driving up demand for advisory and information services downstream.
“We enable $10+ of advisory and information services revenue for every $1 we make. Together with leading institutions, we’re building something bigger than ourselves—an ecosystem where everyone thrives,” he added.
Real-world business decisions require much more than simply synthesising the open web, even if many AI systems concentrate on discovering and summarising information utilising LLMs. They require proprietary data, including expert and consumer survey primary data, as well as market understanding frameworks, or “ontologies,” as Harsh Sahai refers to them.
Continuing, for a corporation to use outputs to make decisions that could affect tens of millions of dollars, they must be repeatable and auditable. The only company employing agents to collect primary data and methodically identify patterns in it to produce unique insights is Bridgetown Research.
According to Anagh Prasad, an Accel investor: “AI is causing widespread disruptions across many enterprise functions, and Bridgetown Research is riding that wave by assisting executives in making important strategic decisions. We are pleased to see Bridgetown serving several marquee customers, with users likening its platform to having a team of top-tier consultants at their fingertips.
“We are excited to partner with Harsh, who, with his background as an ace AI research scientist turned management consultant, blends a unique combination of skills and insight needed to imagine this whole new category of applied AI,” Prasad added.
When Bridgetown Research first started out, it concentrated on screening diligence for private equity deals. Bridgetown Research is already used for deal screening and more thorough commercial diligence by some elite PE & VC companies. Teams can now screen their pipeline considerably more quickly, with the first analysis taking 24 hours as opposed to weeks without Bridgetown, allowing them to concentrate on making decisions rather than conducting research and analysis.
BrandSpur technology and information news desk report that Voice-of-customer interactions with hundreds of respondents have been made possible by Bridgetown for other clients in a matter of days.
According to Lightspeed investor Ishaan Preet Singh: “Companies are built on the quality of strategic decisions, and the research and analysis behind it. Bridgetown Research enables the smartest executives and investors to make these decisions with an order of magnitude more information, and at a pace that was earlier impossible. Harsh and Bridgetown are already creating immense value for their customers, but are still just scratching the surface of the leverage that AI can create.”
The need for efficient and effective decision-making tools keeps growing as global markets get more complex. However, Bridgetown Research intends to use this funding round to increase its investment in extending business collaborations to improve access to domain-specific intelligence and train its AI agents to do a wider range of studies.
