The View from the Office. 

I met up with Ken Sena, co-founder of Aiera, at the Sant Ambroeus Coffee Bar on the Upper East Side. He had an Americano. I had a cappuccino and a croissant.  

Ken was in town for the Substantive conference at the Metropolitan Club and made time to update me on some big news: the company had just raised $25 million in new funding.

Aiera provides institutional investors with access to investment banking research, along with tools to generate insights from the library of content.  

The company also plans to begin creating proprietary research, though the reports wouldn’t include price targets or explicit buy or sell ratings.

Ken is well positioned to lead the effort. He started his career at Salomon Smith Barney and later worked at Bear Steans and Credit Suisse before moving to Evercore where he was global head of Internet Research. 

In 2017, he left for Wells Fargo where he started an internal project that led him to form Aiera when he left the bank a year later. 

Since then he’s been building the platform and painstaking assembling deals for content from a score of top research firms including Third Bridge, Barclays, Jefferies, Bernstein, Evercore, Deutsche, Macquarie and UBS. Microsoft serves as a strategic technology partner, providing Azure infrastructure to support Aiera’s generative AI capabilities.

Generative AI has already transformed the landscape for content in general and Wall Street research in particular. Specifically, it offers the potential to unlock tremendous value from the libraries of reports written over decades. 

A number of startups have already started tapping into that opportunity by building co-pilots that let firms search their own research. They could, for example, query how a company’s strategy has changed over the course of years. 

That kind of insight works much better when you have curated, high-quality content instead of random posts from less reputable sources on the internet. 

Aiera and others sense an opportunity in part because the giants like Bloomberg, Refinitiv and Factset have been relatively slow to incorporate AI into their research products.

Aiera also offers the banks the possibility to leverage AI tools to analyze their own research instead of being forced to build them. 

Because it is so heavily regulated, organizing and disseminating research on Wall Street research has long provided opportunities and challenges. 

A key issue revolves around what’s known variously as “entitlements” or “permissioning” or “privileging.”  That is the system which allows a bank to allow certain people to access research based on their firm or position. It’s harder to build and manage than you might think.

Of course, everything that is hard is also valuable and potentially lucrative. 

You can connect with Ken via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.