When Kumesh Aroomoogan was working in the public finance department at Citigroup, he spent hours looking at financial statements, copying and pasting from one document to the next, arranging and rearranging his Excel sheet, and performing a lot of repeated manual tasks. "They were scaling on labor versus technology," Aroomoogan says. "I thought there has to be a better way to automate this entire process." So in 2014, Aroomoogan, who had an idea for a product, teamed up with Anshul Vikram Pandey, a data visualization PhD student at NYU at the time, and the two started working in Aroomoogan's basement in Queens, NY. What came out of the effort of the two entrepreneurs is Accern, an enterprise whose AI Platform contains ready-made solutions for the financial service industry.

Subjective chatter analysis is a tricky business. But the entrepreneurs behind the New York startup Accern believe using artificial intelligence to analyze Twitter and Tumblr can turn stock investments into a lot more money. It's not Accern's focus on AI that makes it unique. According to Mckinsey & Company, entrepreneurial AI-ventures garnered global investments worth between $26 to $39 billion in 2016. These days, AI gurus promising miraculous investment strategies are practically a dime a dozen.