One irony of ChatGPT is it has exposed both how much could be written and how little has been written. 

That’s particularly true for financial media, the industry in which I’ve worked for three decades.

People tend to assume there is widespread news coverage about most companies in America. 

In fact, large companies get a disproportionate amount. Small public companies get little to no press and private companies are largely invisible. 

That’s one of the things we’re working on at Pricing Culture, an AI company I co-founded last year that creates machine generated content. 

Our strategy is to take numbers and turn them into narratives. 

Specifically, we ingest API feeds of public and private data and return contextual stories that can be read by humans and ingested by machines.

Our newest project is to focus on the hard-to-find information about private companies.

Most of the attention in the press and among investors goes to the companies in the S&P 500. There are another 5,000 that are publicly traded.

There’s less scrutiny of and information about private companies. There are 1,000 private unicorns and another 100,000 that have raised capital. 

We are working on a project to produce news stories based on financial data from the 100,000 private companies in the U.S. that have been financed. 

It’s timely because demand to invest in private companies has been exploding while the number of public companies has been fairly static for a decade, in part because companies are delaying IPOs.

Private companies are attracting more and more interest from private equity and venture capital, as well as the investors who want to buy the notes they issue to finance growth.

That’s created demand for information though most private companies don’t file quarterly reports  with the SEC.

Our insight was that by turning numbers into text it makes the information more accessible, both for people who can read reports and machines like LLMs which consume unstructured data. 

If you want to learn more, reach out to me or my co-founder Bhargav Shivarthy via LinkedIn.