New York-based AI startup Pinegap has raised an $8 million Series A round to expand its platform that helps institutional investors automate equity research workflows.
The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Inventus, Silicon Valley Quad, and DeVC. The company said the funding will be used to grow its sales and go-to-market efforts, expand its engineering team, and hire former equity research analysts to strengthen its product.
Founded in 2024 by former JPMorgan analyst Ankit Varmani and IIT alumnus Deepak Sharma, Pinegap develops AI agents designed specifically for institutional buy-side investors, including hedge funds, long-only mutual funds, and registered investment advisors (RIAs). Rather than offering a general-purpose chatbot, the platform creates custom AI agents tailored to each firm’s investment process, proprietary data, and reporting formats.
The company’s AI agents automate recurring research tasks such as earnings previews, company primers, and investment thesis tracking. Instead of requiring analysts to prompt the system for information, Pinegap delivers research automatically based on scheduled updates or market events.
According to the company, Pinegap has deployed more than 1,000 AI agents across more than 100 institutional clients, generating over 50,000 research reports each month.
“Buy-side analysts typically cover 20 to 40 companies in their main coverage while monitoring hundreds in their shopping list. Their days are structured around recurring, high-stakes workflows that are still largely done by hand,” said Deepak Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Pinegap. “Every workflow we automate, whether it’s an earnings preview, a company primer, or a thesis tracker, is time an analyst gets back to focus on what only they can do: judgment, conviction, and decisions. Pinegap isn’t a chatbot or a search tool. It’s a platform built around how a fund actually operates, tuned to their data, their format, and their investment style.”
The startup is targeting a segment of financial services where research teams are under increasing pressure to process growing volumes of market data while maintaining investment performance. By automating repetitive research tasks, Pinegap aims to allow analysts and portfolio managers to spend more time on investment decisions rather than manual analysis.
The company’s origins trace back to a collaboration between its founders before Pinegap was launched. Sharma approached Varmani, who was preparing to launch his own investment fund, to learn equity research. As large language models became increasingly capable, the pair recognized an opportunity to automate many of the repetitive tasks involved in institutional research and built Pinegap around that insight.
Stellaris Venture Partners, which led the financing, believes the company’s combination of financial expertise and AI capabilities positions it well within the institutional investment market.
“Buy-side analysts and portfolio managers are among the most intellectually demanding and capacity-constrained professionals in financial services, and the tools they rely on have not kept pace with the volume and complexity of what they manage,” said Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners. “Pinegap is solving a real, high-stakes problem with a team that has lived it from both sides, the domain depth of a career analyst combined with the technical velocity of a product builder. What they have built in a short period of time, and the caliber of funds already using it, speaks for itself.”
With the new funding, Pinegap plans to expand its go-to-market and engineering teams while building an in-house group of former equity research analysts. As institutional investors increasingly look to AI to improve productivity, the company is betting that purpose-built AI agents will become a core part of how investment firms conduct research.
