Bridgetown Research Secures $19M to Enhance AI-Driven Due Diligence

Due diligence can be a real wallet-drainer, and it's not just about investing. Whether you're a company launching a new product or exploring a partnership, digging up the right data and doing the research can drag on for weeks and rack up a hefty bill. It's even pricier when you bring in third-party agencies and consultants to help make those smart decisions.

Enter Bridgetown Research, a fresh AI startup that's promising to slash those costs and speed things up. They're using AI agents to handle most of the grunt work involved in due diligence. And they're not just talking the talk—they've recently bagged $19 million in a Series A round, co-led by big names like Accel and Lightspeed.

Launched in December 2023 by CEO Harsh Sahai, who's got a background at McKinsey and Amazon, Bridgetown Research has developed three types of AI agents. These clever bots can gather info, crunch it down, and spit it out in a way that's easy to digest.

Bridgetown taps into the same networks that consultants and researchers use—those industry experts who can give you the lowdown on a company or sector. The startup teams up with these expert networks and uses its AI voice agent to chat with them, pulling out the info their clients need.

"Because insiders don't have to schedule a call with a human being, they can log on whenever and have a conversation," Sahai explained. "Instead of talking to one senior executive, you can talk to mid-tenure people, but a lot more of them ... at a much higher scale."

The second set of agents then uses large language models (LLMs) and some fancy clustering and regression tools to make sense of the data collected by the voice agents. They feed this back to the LLMs to summarize the findings. The third set of agents then uses smaller language models to turn this into something you can actually use, like a presentation.

With these agents, Bridgetown claims it can whip up an initial due diligence analysis in just 24 hours, pulling in insights from hundreds of respondents.

Sahai says clients can either use Bridgetown's agents to gather data and insights on their own, or they can team up with an independent consultant or a small consulting firm to get the same quality of analysis you'd expect from big names like McKinsey or Bain.

Sounds great, right? But there's a catch: large language models and the AI agents built on them can sometimes make stuff up—known as "hallucinating." So, how can you trust research done by an AI? Sahai says they've got it covered with their "steerability and auditability" approach.

This means clients can check the data and see exactly how the agent got to its conclusions, kind of like those "reasoning" AI models. Plus, the voice agents record their chats with experts, so you can double-check the info manually.

Sahai also pointed out that their AI agents don't just rely on one source. They gather info from multiple places, use large language models to interpret it, and then fine-tune models to process the data.

"We haven't seen our approach before," Sahai said. "Most platforms leave it to you to collect the information you need, and then they will process it on your behalf."

Bridgetown isn't the only one trying to make due diligence easier—there are others like Mako AI and DiligentIQ. But Sahai believes their platforms don't offer a complete solution.

Bridgetown Research already has two customers in the U.K. and a dozen in the U.S., including top private equity and venture capital funds, consulting firms, and big corporations working on M&A deals, according to Sahai.