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Auquan raises $4.5M to automate deep work in finance with AI
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Auquan raises $4.5M to automate deep work in finance with AI

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October 30, 2024

Anna Wood is the Editor of Startups Magazine. She joined…

Auquan is the first AI solution to leverage an AI agent architecture and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to automate deep knowledge-intensive workflows in financial services. Twenty-five percent of the top 20 global asset managers, investment banks, and private equity firms use Auquan to unlock transformative productivity gains, make better-informed decisions faster, and outperform their competitors.

The new funding will be primarily allocated to expanding Auquan’s engineering and sales teams. New hires will be at the forefront of solving some of the most complex challenges in the financial industry, working with state-of-the-art AI architectures to revolutionise how financial institutions handle deep, knowledge-intensive tasks and expanding market presence.

While horizontal generative AI tools are gaining popularity for shallow tasks like enterprise search and customer support – typically limited to simple searches or single query-response interactions – Auquan is designed to handle “deep work”: complex, recurring, multistep workflows that are vital to business operations and demand specialised knowledge, sustained focus, and precision.

Finance teams are filled with brilliant professionals who excel at deep work, such as writing 20-50 page investment and credit memos, conducting due diligence, managing compliance, monitoring risk, and producing detailed ESG reports. While some of this work differentiates your firm, other complex and time-intensive aspects – like searching through lengthy documents or drafting reports – are essential yet undifferentiated.

Auquan liberates your top talent from these time-consuming yet routine aspects of deep knowledge work, enabling them to instead focus on high-value, strategic work that drives the business forward and enhances competitiveness.

“Auquan’s remarkable growth and customer traction validates our belief that they’re uniquely positioned to solve a critical challenge in finance: freeing highly skilled teams from the grind of wading through noisy data, performing undifferentiated work to support high-impact decisions,” said Swaroop Kolluri, Founder and Managing Partner, Neotribe. “Their RAG-based AI agent architecture is truly transformative, allowing professionals to focus on strategic, meaningful work while enabling firms to gain a competitive edge. We’re thrilled to support Auquan as they revolutionise deep work productivity and decision-making in finance.”

RAG-Based AI Agent Architecture and Deep Work Automation

Similar to the advanced reasoning capability seen in OpenAI’s o1 model, Auquan’s RAG-based architecture is designed to handle deep knowledge workflows by decomposing them into discrete tasks. These workflows in financial services can involve hundreds of parallel and sequential steps, with each output feeding into the next. This complexity requires a sophisticated approach, where the model breaks down problems into manageable parts and takes the necessary time to process each – reflecting the thoughtfulness of human reasoning. Auquan’s architecture is purpose-built to navigate these intricate workflows, delivering outputs that meet high standards of accuracy, comprehensiveness and trust, as demanded by clients like UBS, Federated Hermes, and BC Partners.

See Also
When global labour market data is released, headlines tend to fixate on a single metric: unemployment. This year is no different. According to the latest figures from the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation, global unemployment remains relatively stable at just under five per cent. At face value, this suggests a labour market that is holding firm despite economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability and technological upheaval. In reality, it masks a serious and underreported problem: the true global jobs crisis is not a lack of work, but the growing scale of informal work. More than 2.1 billion people worldwide are employed in the informal economy, including misclassified workers operating outside effective regulatory coverage, where employment is typically unregistered, contracts are absent or unenforced, and access to labour rights and social protections is limited or non-existent. That represents a large portion of the global workforce. If unemployment reveals how many people cannot find work, informality shows how many are working without protection or long-term opportunity. Informal work is often associated with developing economies or unregulated sectors. However, this form of work is increasingly occurring within developed economies and regulated sectors, hidden within otherwise legitimate, fast-growing small and medium-sized enterprises – and this is often unintentional. For both businesses operating solely in domestic markets and those that have expanded abroad, adopting new workforce models and attempting to respond to rapid technological change, the crisis of informality is emerging in three key areas. The first is worker misclassification. Individuals are engaged as independent contractors but operate in practice like employees – working fulltime, at set hours, for years at a time. This is particularly prevalent in gig and platform-based roles, where algorithms determine pay, hours and performance without considering employment rights. Gig and platform work often presents as flexible and empowering, however, in practice, many platforms exercise employer-like control over payment, performance management, hours, and length of engagement, while explicitly avoiding employer obligations such as tax filings and the provision of statutory benefits like annual leave and healthcare. The result is a growing cohort of workers who fall between legal categories, carrying the risks of self-employment without the autonomy or protections that should accompany this mode of work. The second area is cross-border remote work, where informality can inadvertently arise. With post-COVID remote working models here to stay, companies are directly hiring overseas talent, assuming that because the worker is not based in the company’s home country, local employment laws do not apply. Where employment is not properly registered (whether by the employer and/or employee), local labour law is not applied, or social security obligations are misunderstood or ignored, these arrangements can slip into a form of modern informality, even where the relationship appears to be formal on the surface. This is often the point at which organisations begin to seek external guidance. In many cases, neither party fully understands the legal implications of the arrangement, which leaves both employer and worker exposed. We frequently see organisations approach us when a specific issue surfaces, such as payroll inconsistencies, questions around benefits entitlement, or concerns raised by the workers themselves, including registration process failures. Business leaders should also be aware that permanent establishment risk can arise if a remote employee is deemed to represent the company locally, which can trigger corporate tax obligations. Social security errors can happen when contributions are not made correctly in either jurisdiction, leaving workers without coverage and employers facing backdated liabilities. Meanwhile, employment law conflicts can emerge when contracts fail to meet the requirements of the host country regarding notice periods, benefits or termination rights. The third driver of informality is structural. These arrangements are becoming more common as artificial intelligence and evolving workforce models outpace regulation. Businesses are innovating at speed, but legal frameworks are struggling to keep pace. The UK’s Employment Rights Act offers a clear case study of the direction of travel. Worker protections are expanding, classification rules are tightening and enforcement is becoming more coordinated across agencies. Informal arrangements that once sat in legal grey areas are moving firmly into view and what was previously tolerated is falling under scrutiny. The challenge is that informality is rarely a deliberate choice. For many growing organisations, it becomes the default because compliant pathways are complicated and difficult to navigate alone, particularly across multiple jurisdictions. Legal advice, payroll, tax, HR, and immigration compliance are often siloed, leaving gaps that businesses may not even realise exist until a problem arises. For instance, digital nomad visas are often viewed as providing holders with wholly compliant right to work status, however employers may not realise that this is not always the case and contracts may not reflect the correct legal status or entitlements. Addressing informality requires a change in how we think about employment at a global level and recognising that flexibility and compliance are not mutually exclusive. Businesses need models that allow them to access global talent quickly while ensuring workers are properly employed and protected under local law. As attention remains fixed on unemployment figures, informality continues to expand beneath the surface. It is this hidden cohort of workers, contributing economically without security or rights, that represents the real crisis in the global labour market. Solving it will require coordinated action from policymakers and businesses alike, and a commitment to building workforce models that are not only innovative, but sustainable and fair.
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“In an industry where billions can be gained or lost in moments, time is the most valuable asset. Auquan gives it back,” said Chandini Jain, co-founder and CEO of Auquan. “By automating the repetitive work that consumes most of the day for finance professionals, we’re unleashing productivity on an industrial scale. Three years from now, the brightest minds in finance will look back and wonder why they ever had to spend days sifting through hundreds of documents and typing up lengthy reports and memos.”

Transforming Days of Work Into Minutes

Auquan can generate in minutes what typically requires days of manual effort. For instance, it might traditionally take an analyst five days to research and write a 30-page draft credit memo on a company, while Auquan can generate one in five minutes with greater attention to detail and thoroughness. Auquan’s customers are experiencing similar productivity gains for deep workflows such as the production of investment memos, responses to RFPs, business involvement screening, ESG performance reporting, KYB compliance screening, and others.

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