The race to build digital generative AI assistants for advisors and investors continues apace with the announcement this week of a closed $6 million seed funding round for Hamilton Lane, specifically its Helix by HL AI assistant.
Helix itself, which is intended to help advisors researching and analyzing private market investing, was first announced in June and is the result of a collaboration between Hamilton Lane and TIFIN.AI.
That partnership pairs TIFIN, which has worked with multiple firms in building out AI-specific tools and platforms over the last three years, with Hamilton Lane, which is well know for its private markets expertise.
According to the firms, this capital raise resulted in a post-money valuation of Helix by HL at $26 million.
Venture capital firm FINTOP Capital led the round. Based in Nashville, FINTOP has other well known advisory technology providers in its portfolio including Snappy Kraken, BridgeFT and SmartX Advisor Solutions, among others.
Long known as an asset class requiring lengthy analysis from disparate datasets and filled with manual processes requiring humans, the private markets sector is a ripe for automation.
The AI assistant is powered by Hamilton Lane’s proprietary private markets data that encompasses more than $16.7 trillion in private market deals and commitments across several decades. And the assistant is meant to streamline much of the research and processing associated with the sector.
In the future, the technology will also be made available as an API, integrating with wealth platforms and digital marketplaces used by advisors and investors allocating to the private markets. It will not only provide benchmarking on those markets, as well as forecasting, and will help educate private wealth investors and their intermediaries through the use of a conversational interface.
Funds raised in this seed round are to be used toward accelerating product development and enhancing and adding new features to the platform and marketing.
The continued collaboration and funding announcement are a measure of continued progress for TIFIN’s TIFIN.AI initiative announced in July, which itself serves as an incubator of sorts for AI platforms built with other financial services firms.
“TIFIN is trying to accelerate where wealth is going and the large firms can’t move as fast as the world is moving,” said TIFIN founder and CEO Vinay Nair during a recent Q&A.
“We had the view a few years ago that AI and large language models and the building of AI assistants were all accelerating,” he said.