This year, FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] will take place across two days, April 9 & April 11. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight a few of this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Chit-Kwan Lin, Founder and CEO of Revelata, which is based in Palo Alto, California. Revelata is building an AI platform that automatically discovers and extracts structured data from your unstructured, long-form text documents. The company’s first product, called deepKPI, is currently in beta. Revelata is presenting on Thursday, April 11.
Q. CK, tell us a bit about Revelata. What problems are you solving?
A. We make investment professionals bionic by automatically unlocking the information that’s buried deep inside financial texts and across documents.
Q. What is your company’s origin story?
A. In 2020, I met up with Eric, an old friend, just to catch up. Over the several decades of Eric’s finance career in investment banking and private equity, whenever we met up, Eric would reliably grumble to me about the sheer amount of grunt work his analysts needed to do to make use of unstructured documents.
This time it was no different, “Can’t you computer science guys do something to automate this?” In the past, I’d always said what he wanted was still science fiction. But this time, I had recently spent some time in natural language processing, and specifically, working out how to train large neural language models. Suddenly, what Eric had wanted all these years seemed just within reach. So, I founded Revelata in 2021, with the mission to use natural language AIs to help make investment professionals bionic — and Eric is one of our key Advisors.
Q. Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
A. The Fintech Sandbox community is incredibly supportive. Of course, the data access program is a key tangible benefit, but more than that, you know the staff and community are in your corner and want you to succeed. Being a part of Demo Day is a huge leg up for early-stage startups like Revelata, since it significantly amplifies our reach within our target audience. As our company grows, we anticipate Fintech Sandbox will continue to be a great partner and look forward to giving back to the community.
Q. Why is data access important to your startup?
A. Revelata’s first product, deepKPI, discovers and extracts hard-to-get KPI time series from public SEC filings. Our next step is to go beyond these public documents, to earnings calls and news articles. As a startup, tackling these wouldn’t be possible without the Fintech Sandbox’s Data Access program, simply because we wouldn’t be able to get to this data easily.
Q. What milestones has Revelata achieved so far?
A. We have raised $870K in pre-seed, with a grant from the National Science Foundation SBIR Program, and support from JAZZ Venture Partners, and industry insiders. We launched the private beta of deepKPI, our first product, in Q1 of this year, and will open up our public beta in Q3!
Q. What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
A. Top of mind is the introduction of AI assistants into financial analysis and professional’s workflows. Of course, there’s huge risk here due to the underlying architecture of generative AIs, but as NLP experts, we understand those and believe we have a way to avoid them entirely.
Q. How does Revelata think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
A. We are a team of computer scientists specializing in AI and are, of course, an AI-first company. While generative AI has revealed some tantalizing, low-hanging fruit, we believe that there’s no free lunch — you have to put in the work to get AIs to do something that is of value to the market and that is defensible in the market. This really means that you have to do the hard work of specializing AIs to a specific problem domain, especially those problem domains where the only alternative is grueling manual labor. We view our platform’s ability to extract hard-to-get information out of complex unstructured financial documents is a great example of this kind of differentiation.
Q. What’s next for Revelata?
A. We started out providing concrete value by having our AI automatically surface hard-to-get information from SEC filings. We want to expand on this foundation and drive towards a broader vision of bionic finance, where the growing volume and richness of data is simplified by an increase in what we can automate. Ultimately, we want Revelata’s platform to be where accurate and auditable work — ranging from surfacing data to day-to-day analyses and even insight generation — can be done by simply talking to our AI. And we want to extend these capabilities beyond equities into other instruments such as embedded derivatives, private data, and beyond.
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To hear more about Revelata and 11 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] 10!