A British generative AI startup has raised $1.5m (£1.2m) in seed funding to provide automation tools that assist investment firms with deal flow.
London-based Eilla AI says its platform “mirrors” industry professionals to carry out tasks such as market mapping, document creation and offer comparisons.
“The bottom line is that financial professionals are paid to think, not waste time on mundane tasks,” said Nikola Lazarov, CEO of Eilla AI.
“But the amount of time and effort it takes a junior at a financial firm to map out the companies in a specific industry, for example, can spiral quickly.”
Eleven Ventures led the seed round, with Fuel Ventures and its founder Mark Pearson (as an angel investor) also taking part.
The startup plans to use the seed capital to grow into Europe and America.
Eilla AI says over 50 M&A banks, VCs and PE funds have used its financial generative AI software.
Svetozar Georgiev, general partner at Eleven Ventures, said: “The daily work of M&A, VC and PE professionals hasn’t evolved much in the past 30 years, dominated by lots of manual data retrieval and analysis, as well as mundane document creation.”
Georgiev added that Eilla’s generative AI platform will “provide superhuman productivity” and complete tasks in minutes rather than hours or days.
Funding for generative AI companies has bucked a broader investment downturn. According to Dealroom, UK generative AI startups have raised $519.4m between 2019 and 2023, the fourth-highest globally.
Read more: A guide to generative AI