This AI Startup Wants To Automate Your Tedious Document Searches

For the casual internet user, a quick Google search is often all it takes to find plenty of information on any particular topic. But for specialized financial research, analysts often find themselves laboriously searching proprietary databases, regulatory filings, and paywalled sources that aren't even indexed by the big search engines, says Jack Kokko, the founder and CEO of financial search engine company AlphaSense. That's why he and cofounder and CTO Raj Neervannan, created AlphaSense, which applies natural language processing and machine learning techniques to let users find relevant information in financial documents. "It started from my first job out of college as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, where I was, as every analyst, going through these huge piles of paper on my desk and trying to find information very manually--nights and days spent toiling through that information and still fearing that I'm missing a lot," Kokko says. The San Francisco-based company takes in information from thousands of licensed data sources, as well as public web sources like news reports, and automatically processes them to extract meaning on a sentence-by-sentence level.