NEW YORK & TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Boosted.ai, the leading distributed machine learning platform for global investment professionals, today announced the closing of a $35 million USD Series B financing round, led by Ten Coves Capital and Spark Capital. Portage Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and HarbourVest Partners also participated in the round. Inclusive of seed capital, Boosted.ai’s total funding now stands at $46 million USD.
The funding will be used to scale Boosted Insights, the company’s web-based platform that brings explainable machine learning tools to investment managers. By using Boosted Insights, portfolio management teams can augment their existing investment processes, source new ideas and manage risks through AI without any prior coding knowledge.
Co-founded in 2017 by Joshua Pantony, Jon Dorando and Nicholas Abe, Boosted.ai currently has more than 40 active clients across a full spectrum of global asset managers, including hedge funds and ETF providers. RBC, an investor in the round, is a current client of Boosted.ai. In terms of size, Boosted.ai clients range from family offices with roughly $10 million USD in assets under management (AUM) to asset managers with over $1 trillion USD in AUM. In 2021, Boosted.ai more than doubled the number of firms using its platform and increased revenue by 250%, and the company plans to double its current employee count.
In conjunction with the funding round, Dan Kittredge from Ten Coves Capital and Santo Politi from Spark Capital have joined Boosted.ai’s Board of Directors.
Joshua Pantony, CEO of Boosted.ai, said: “The world’s asset managers have never been as focused as they are today on bringing AI to their investment processes, but the number of firms who have successfully developed such capabilities in-house remains remarkably low. For virtually all other managers, a lack of time, money and talent will prevent machine learning from becoming a core competency or true differentiator. We have spent the past five years building Boosted Insights to solve for that gap in a way that is understandable and explainable to all styles of portfolio managers and allocators.”
Nicholas Abe, COO of Boosted.ai, said: “We believe that the future of investing is quantamental: human plus machine. Asset managers generally have a harder time adding the machine element to that equation. By taking care of that for them, we are democratizing access to machine learning and allowing investors to focus on the human talent and domain expertise that truly differentiate their businesses.”
Dan Kittredge, Managing Partner at Ten Coves Capital, said: “The investment management industry is almost unanimously expecting technology, data and digital capabilities to become core differentiators over the next five years. Boosted.ai is perfectly positioned to scale its platform and bring explainable machine learning to an even wider variety of asset managers, regardless of their location, investment style or size.”
Santo Politi, General Partner at Spark Capital, said: “It is inherently difficult for financial firms to build a central repository of machine learning knowledge, which is one of the main reasons why only a handful of managers can claim to power their investment processes through AI. Boosted.ai is becoming a necessary nucleus for machine learning expertise within asset management.”
Adam Felesky, CEO of Portage Ventures, said: “We are excited to expand our investment in Boosted.ai as they bring their explainable financial algorithms to asset managers across regions. Whether you are an ETF provider based in the United States, a traditional asset manager based in China, or a family office based in Europe, Boosted.ai has proven that the combination of machine learning and human expertise can accomplish more than either can alone.”
To learn more or schedule a demo of Boosted Insights, visit here.
About Boosted.ai
Boosted.ai is an artificial intelligence company that enhances portfolio management outcomes for the global financial industry through distributed machine learning. Co-founded by Joshua Pantony, Jon Dorando and Nicholas Abe in 2017, the company and its proprietary web-based platform, Boosted Insights, bring advanced quantitative investing techniques to portfolio managers, without requiring any coding or data science background. Headquartered in Toronto and New York City, Boosted.ai is backed by Portage Ventures, Ten Coves Capital, Spark Capital and other leading investors. Learn more at boosted.ai and follow us on LinkedIn.
About Ten Coves Capital
Ten Coves Capital invests in innovative, high growth FinTech companies. Ten Coves seeks to partner with talented, passionate entrepreneurs where its capital, network and decades of experience can help accelerate growth and value creation. The Ten Coves team has helped scale numerous strategically significant companies solving industry pain points, enabling workflows, and providing critical infrastructure to help re-wire the financial ecosystem. For more information, visit tencoves.com.
About Spark Capital
We are Spark Capital, investors in products we love by creators we admire, including Affirm, Carta, Coinbase, Cruise, Discord, Oculus, Plaid, Postmates, Slack, Twitter, and Wayfair. We know there are no playbooks or formulas for success and are here to help founders win their own way. We invest across all sectors and stages, and work out of San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.
About Portage Ventures
Portage Ventures is a global investor dedicated to supporting FinTech companies. The Portage team has deep entrepreneurial and industry experience and provides founders with privileged access to the firm’s partners, in-house experts, and broader global ecosystem. Portage Ventures has a presence in Canada, the US, Europe and Asia. Portage is a part of multi-asset class alternative investment platform Sagard. To learn more, visit portagevc.com.
