Investment Announcement
02/12/2020

Proud To Announce Fin Venture Capital Leading Aiera’s Series A

I’m excited to share that we recently led Aiera’s $7 million Series A fundraise and I will be joining the board.

Having spent much of my career in innovation roles at Asset Managers, I observed massive inefficiencies in the front office technology that Portfolio Managers and Analysts have at their disposal. These talented front-line users are typically operating across 5-7 disparate tools and often decisioning ends up being driven off of an Excel spreadsheet. Further, traditional Asset Managers are struggling to keep up with global Quant firms who drive 30%+ of equity volumes and need access to “Quant-as-a-Service” (QaaS) solutions with AI/ML, market data aggregation, and advanced analytics/prediction engines to remain competitive. We believe Aiera solves for many of these needs and is providing advanced tools within traditional investment communication workflows that are allowing its users to up-level and optimize their limited bandwidth.

Through its automated and proactive processing of over 30K investor events a year, Aiera offers company-specific insights and the ability for users to take advantage of a growing list of features around relevant document discovery and event monitoring. It is nothing short of transformative for anyone looking to better manage the enormous amount of information being exchanged between companies and their investors, all dynamic and real-time. Aiera was founded by former Internet equity research analyst, Ken Sena (CEO) – Wells Fargo, Evercore – and Amazon Alexa engineering lead, Bryan Healey (CTO). Aiera began as a collaboration between Ken and Bryan on ways in which natural language processing could be used to improve investment workflow. It now provides aggregation for critical live investment events, including earnings calls, analyst days, management conferences, and more, tying these events to millions of documents that it simultaneously processes and analyzes daily.

We have put together an incredible syndicate of leading players in our industry to support Aiera’s growth trajectory and am pleased to share that Fin is joined in this round by Macquarie Group, Citi Markets FinTech Investments, and Franklin Templeton, as well as returning investor, Flybridge Capital (Series Seed lead). On the board, I have joined Ken and Bryan, as well as Chip Hazard, General Partner of Flybridge, and Diane Schumaker-Krieg, formerly Global Head of Research, Economics & Strategy for Wells Fargo.

Aiera was started with a focus on the buy side with the goal of helping fundamentally-focused active managers leverage data science as a service. Aiera now delivers to a growing number of institutional client types, including wealth management, research, sales and trading, capital markets, investment banking and corporate (IROs and c-suite level execs). This is why I am also extremely pleased to see Aiera benefit from the deep industry knowledge and expertise that its new board observers bring, including Joe Boerio, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Franklin Templeton, Miki Edelman, Head of Strategic Client Solutions for Macquarie Group, and Gavin Skinner, COO of Citi Research.

I started Fin with a focus on early stage (Seed/A entry points) B2B, principally Enterprise SaaS FinTech companies within six sub-sectors where we see global greenfields: Alternative Lending, Asset Management, Real Estate Tech, InsureTech, Blockchain Enterprise Applications, and Enabling Tech. Aiera is among the best examples of an Asset Management tech company serving the investing community, and I am proud of the role that Fin is playing in helping Aiera to be the leading event intelligence and insights platform for the industry. I look forward to working with Ken, Bryan, the other board members, and broader Aiera team to build that future.

Read More at Yahoo Money: “Aiera Raises $7M to Further Event Intelligence and Insights Platform”