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COMPANY OVERVIEW

WEBSITE

www.aiera.com

FOUNDERS

Ken Sena (CEO), Bryan Healey (CTO)

LOCATIONS

Headquarters in NY with offices in Boston, Austin, and San Diego

EMPLOYEES

18 full time employees

MILESTONES

• 09/2018 - Aiera founded and begins commercial operations
• 10/2018 - First customers signed
• 12/2018 - Aiera raises $3.5mm seed round led by Flybridge and with participation from Macquarie, Innovation Endeavors, and Fin VC
• 06/2021 - Aiera raises $7mm Series A led by FinVC and including Macquarie, Citi, Franklin Templeton
• 07/2021 - Aiera announces strategic partnership with Helios and tonal sentiment offering
• 07/2021 - Aiera raises additional strategic capital from Citi, Franklin Templeton, and FinVC

CLIENTS

Core:

• Buy and sellside analysts within the institutional investment industry. Clients size is diverse with contracts ranging from a single seat to hundreds.
• No particular focus on size or geography.
• Aiera has use cases available for corporates, investment banking, private equity, investor relations, and business development.

Growth Areas:

• Focused on expanding to new customers, particularly corporates, investment banking, private equity, investor relations, and business development.
• Expansion of enterprise-level relationships within Aiera's core institutional investor customer segment.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

DELIVERY

SaaS

DESCRIPTION

Aiera offers LIVE event monitoring & financial search platform covering all available Wall Street events across 10,000+ global equities, whose events are accessible with a single click (both live and after the fact).

Features Include:

• Document search (e.g., news, corporate activity, SEC filings)...live and archived
• Stream live audio with DVR-style controls
• Custom monitor creation
• Live note-taking and collaboration tool, which can be dynamically inserted directly within the text of the event
• Topic monitoring and alerting: AI-powered topic detection and textual/tonal sentiment divergence
• Secure recording and transcription
• Custom event availability: leverage Aiera's audio tech stack to connect into, record, and transcribe events of your choosing

DIFFERENTIATOR

More live events than any other platform, with ability to pause/rewind/restart live audio mid-event.

TECH STACK

Web-based dashboard, I-Frame, Interop Platforms (Glue42, Cosaic by Finsemble, Eze Eclipse), and certain datasets available by API.

PRODUCT EVOLUTION

Continuously improving quality of transcription, breadth and accuracy of events covered, and reliability of the platform.

INTERVIEW

Anduril Partners (AP) sat down with Conor McDade, Aiera's CFO, to get some insights on his firm:

AP: Could you explain 'how' you came up with the name, Aiera?

CM: Aiera began as a research collaboration between Ken Sena, a former global Internet analyst on the sell side, and Bryan Healey, former Amazon Alexa engineer and head of AI at a startup in Boston. The two began collaborating on ways in which Ken could leverage Bryan's technical expertise to enhance the role of an equity research analyst / fundamental investor. Aiera was born out of this collaboration where, in the early days, Aiera was distilling publicly available text documents, such as news, filings, transcripts, and market data to make short-term stock price predictions. The acronym we gave to this early version of the product was "Aiera," which at the time stood for Artificially Intelligent Equity Research Analyst. In the years since, Aiera has evolved to still leverage many advanced AI/ML applications but provide better front-end tooling that helps our end users understand the "why." In particular, this has meant leaning into investor events which are an important piece of a fundamental investors workflow requiring close attention but also difficult to monitor given the amount of information and heavy volume, particularly during earnings and conference season.

AP: What is the composition of your company?

CM: Aiera is almost evenly split between our developer team and business team. On the business side, we are predominantly customer focused with an even split of sales and customer success personnel.

AP: In a nutshell, what does Aiera offer?

CM: Aiera is the only LIVE event monitoring & financial search platform covering all available Wall Street events across 10,000+ global equities, whose events are accessible with a single click--both live and after the fact. Aiera's web-based platform allows users to search through the scrolling transcription, listen to live audio, and leverage DVR-style controls on over 40,000 investor events annually (and growing). Each event tracked by Aiera features AI-powered topic detection, textual and tonal sentiment analysis, and text/tonal divergence. On top of our core events service, Aiera also enables users to create custom monitors searching across both live and historical transcripts, news, corporate activity, and news, and even take notes/collaborate directly within the text of the event itself, as it is happening. Users can also take advantage of Aiera's audio tech stack and to securely record, transcribe, and search your private meetings, too, regardless of whether or not you were even able to attend.

AP: What challenge are you solving and why do clients hire you over competitors?

CM: At its core, Aiera helps clients cut through the noise and extract valuable insights from investor events, an otherwise very time consuming task. By offering one click access to every key event across over 10,000 publicly traded equities, our users can have the confidence that all the key information being conveyed by the companies they follow to the public is captured and at their fingertips with our access, monitoring, and alerting capabilities.

AP: How long does it take to start using your products once I become a client?

CM: Very little. Aiera prides itself on being an easy to adopt product with intuitive features. Users can begin using the product almost instantly after being setup for a trial and creating watchlist of the companies they care about to help curate the experience. Aiera also offers many template monitors to help users organize all the information flowing into the platform. Aiera also is available via an iOS mobile app and can be integrated into other formats upon request.

AP: Is there a certain client that benefits the greatest from your services?

CM: Our customer set is primarily comprised of fundamental institutional investors (both buy side and sell side) although we also serve corporate and business development use cases as well. For institutional investors specifically, those that value speed and accuracy of information seem to benefit from our service as we excel in both of those areas relative to competitors. Time is frequently of the essence when it comes to making investment decisions and we deliver on that for our users.

AP: What do you see as your greatest customer barrier to using your products/services?

CM: Our biggest barrier is likely the battle for screen space among our customers. With a growing amount of information our investors are responsible for, there are a growing number of tools and datasets they are trying to work into their process. Because of that, many are reluctant to try new solutions as they fear having to learn a new product and find ways to incorporate it vs. continuing to use a bigger market data platform like FactSet or Bloomberg which have more "under one roof" but offer an inferior experience around events in comparison. This is why Aiera is focused on expanding the number of ways we deliver our solution to clients. While most continue to access our platform through our web based dashboard and mobile app, we support the ability to I-Frame our dashboard into client-side applications, offer certain data feeds the support our UI through APIs, and also will soon be offering Aiera via various widgets inside of interop platforms like Glue42, Eze Eclipse, and Cosaic by Finsemble.