Prelude to the AI Financial Agent
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Welcome to “Neural Markets”
This is our very first post on the Decisional blog called “Neural Markets” and we’re incredibly excited to share our journey and learnings. The name is an ode to deep learning and neural networks being a transformative technology applied to private financial markets.
As a fun fact we learned from Gwen (the anonymous writer who predicted the scaling laws) on the Dwarkesh podcast: by writing, we contribute to the corpus of text that AI models learn from, effectively influencing how these systems evolve. Gwen emphasizes that this is a critical moment for writers, thinkers, and professionals to “vote” for the values, perspectives, and insights they want AI to carry forward. We share that belief wholeheartedly. By telling our story, we not only reflect on our experiences but also ensure that our voice, our principles, and our vision for the future of AI make it into the training data.
Moreover, since our own product offers source-grounded insights, we’re having a lot of fun using Decisional itself to craft these posts. It feels like the perfect way to bring our technology full circle—building an AI Agent while benefiting from its capabilities as we write.
Recap: The AI Agent for Financial Work
At Decisional, we’re building an AI Agent designed for deep financial work in private markets. We founded Decisional under the conviction that AI would soon spread into every imaginable domain—as a consequence of having “intelligence on tap.” Our founding team has worked at banks, fintechs, and investment funds; wherever we looked, the same story repeated itself: tiresome “pass the butter” tasks are widespread in financial services, and they drain resources and morale.
We saw that finance was starved for rapid, on-demand intelligence. As AI evolves from a 100 IQ assistant to a 200 IQ powerhouse and more close to AGI, the back office and front office will both transform, providing teams with superhuman capabilities that older paradigms of Bloomberg + Excel + MS Office trinity simply won’t do justice.
Tech Eating Financial Services from the Outside In
Technology has long approached the financial services space from the outside in changing business models, platforms but leaving internal business processes untouched. By harnessing the Internet and mobile technology, disruptors like Stripe, Robinhood, Venmo, and PayPal ate into the stack of traditional banks and financial firms. But their impact mostly stayed consumer-facing. Internally, old processes and “pass the butter” work continued unabated. Even the most forward-looking fintechs still rely on large teams for customer support and onboarding.
AI Will Now Devour Unstructured Work
There is little value in making people sift through hundreds of files, reconcile line items, or scan contracts for specific clauses. All this administrative overhead acts as an economic tax. Just like digital payments effectively obliterated many costs associated with handling cash, AI will soon eliminate much of this menial unstructured work.
“What is your purpose?”
“You pass butter.”
Old Tools Are Handicapped
Every seismic shift in technology prompts a question about the right abstraction layer. When Intel focused on hardware, Microsoft took the lead in software. During the Internet era, Google dominated.
In this new Agentic age, many legacy solutions—like RPA (Robotic Process Automation)or No Code Tooling —promise AI wrapped on automation but fail to leverage AI’s deeper intelligence. These have been built for the old paradigm, automating only what was already there rather than rethinking it for advanced AI. The right solution taps into the power of these models by reinventing the software experience around AI, rather than grafting AI onto outdated systems.
When we started working on Decisional some time was spent some time initially creating no code draggable blocks to hard code logic since the models were inferior and we quickly realised with progress in post training and test time compute that so many decisions could be outsourced to intelligence on tap that we ended up re-focusing on the old adage “working backwards”.
Our Constitution for an AI Agent in Financial Work
At Decisional, we’ve spent a great deal of time considering the fundamental elements that define deep financial work on not just what will help us drive automation but bring superhuman excellence in this field. We spoke to hundreds of users in the past year from all kinds of Financial Services firms - from Investment Bankers at J.P Morgan, Portfolio Managers at Fidelity, Analysts at PE shops, Data operations managers at sub $50M funds and Chief Underwriting officers at Insurance firms across the front office as well as the back office to distill the most important elements of our AI Agent.
These are the pillars that power our vision of a “bionic analyst” of the future, a version of our constitutional AI that will reflect the alignment principles and values of the AI Agent we will build.
Transparency in Sources of Information - Reflecting the need of great analysts to sift through their sources of information to understand truth
Fact & Metric Focused - Emphasizing the importance of metrics and facts over subjective information
Built for Power Users who want Control - The best financial professionals want every edge that they can get instead of oversimplification
Enable Creativity of Financial Thought - Lastly AI now affords us a new paradigm enabling more creativity and fun in learning and work
The Neural Interface for Decisional: Source grounded Deep, Living Memos and Quant Magic Tables
In light of these pillars—and the limits of human attention—we developed two core artifacts that capture all unstructured data and workflows in our platform wrapped into a source grounded media
AI-Powered Memos – Living documents that adapt as you work, enabling narrative-driven insights and collaboration.
Magic Tables – AI spreadsheets designed to handle everything from financial modeling to analytics. Together, they represent the two sides of the bionic analyst: deep, thoughtful narrative creation and powerful number-crunching capabilities.
The Journey so far
This year was an exciting moment for the team from founding the company to many neural pathway unlocking moments:
Our co-founding team moved to San Francisco from working remote across London, NY and SF
All founders got their O1s and are locked in
Got accepted into Character Labs and learned about design sprints from JZ, Jake and Eli
Accepted into NVIDIA Inception and the LBS Incubator
Made it to Y Combinator in our first attempt
Raised a pre seed from some amazing investors like Character VC and Moonfire Ventures and Angels
Landed our first customers and 10Xd our revenue during the last few months
Got featured in Bens Bites & Insight Partners Agent Ecosystem market map
Looking ahead
We’re only just beginning this journey, but we believe our AI Agent for financial work will help financial professional rethink decision-making with AI. It is no coincidence that we named the company “Decisional”.
We will be sharing updates about our progress, use cases, and philosophy. Stay tuned for future blog posts as we delve deeper into the technology and vision behind Decisional. We are breaking up our posts into 4 categories to tailor to different themes.
Fog of AI - Market Insights & Thoughts
Bionic Finance - Augmenting Finance using AI
Labs - Technical Deep Dives
Journey - Sneak Peek into Decisional
Written by - Dhruv
31st Dec, 2024
