AI for Hedge Funds Tracker
Completing my post about tracking AI startups for hedge funds
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about startups I have been tracking that are building for hedge fund investors. Since then, I have received very helpful inbound pointing out startups I missed. I have since added many of these that I have missed.
I have centralized the list on my personal website1, so that I can update it without having to republish posts here (and Substack does not have great support for tables). Click below to see the list:
My general criteria for including startups includes:
Focus: I avoid general-purpose, productivity types of tools that could be used by hedge funds. The exception is where the founders have a hedge fund background and have spent time on this specific use case.
Startups: I avoid mature businesses that have launched AI-features. This is necessarily a judgement call, but the line has to be drawn somewhere (otherwise I would be listing Bloomberg, etc. which seems unhelpful).
Adjacencies: I have occasionally included startups building for private equity, especially if there seems to be a natural leap towards public markets
Institutional: I avoid businesses that are retail-investor focused, even if they could be conceivably be used by someone working at a hedge fund. The exception is where the startup has firm, published plans to target institutions as well.
In the future, I plan to complete classifications around funds centered on
Silicon Valley (💻) vs. Wall Street (📈) DNA: do the founders come from top-tier backgrounds on the buy-side or from the OpenAI mafia? In practice, the best startups will blend both, but in the near-term I have noticed distinct differences stemming from the founding teams’ background.
Product Types: there are some repeating product modalities that are helpful to classify. For instance, there is revolving theme around building modified “deep research interfaces” or “Cursor for Excel Copilots”. There seems to be a few of these recurring common patterns as we all search for PMF.
These are necessarily subjective judgement calls. As always, please feel free to share your feedback or send me links to startups I have missed.
Do you have any list of PE-focused startups? Would love any thoughts/recs!