Distributed machine learning startup Boosted.ai raises $35M

Distributed machine learning startup Boosted.ai revealed today it has raised $35 million in new funding to scale up its web-based platform that brings explainable machine learning tools to investment managers.

Ten Cove Capital and Spark Capital led the Series B round. Also participating in the round were Portage Ventures, Royal Bank of Canada and HarbourVest Partners.

Including the new funding, Boosted.ai has raised $46 million to date. Previous investors include Portage Ventures, Dunamu & Partners and Polar Equity Partners.

Founded in 2017, Boosted.ai offers Boosted Insights, a machine learning platform designed to allow portfolio managers, analysts and chief investment officers to augment their existing investment processes, source new ideas and manage risks. The platform supports idea generation, portfolio construction and portfolio monitoring without coding or other expertise.

Boosted.ai’s platform pitches its machine learning capabilities as allowing the analysis of data in real-time at a scale and scope that is unmatched by humans. The company says the platform helps identify nonintuitive relationships between data and securities, minimize error in predictions, improving risk management and decision-making.

Since last raising funding in 2020, Boosted.ai has grown to more than 40 active clients across a full spectrum of global asset managers, including hedge funds and ETF providers. The company’s clients range from family offices with roughly $10 million in assets under management to asset managers with more than $1 trillion in assets managed.

Last year, Boosted.ai more than doubled the number of firms using its platform and increased revenue by 250%. The company plans to double its headcount to cater for growing demand with the new funding.

“The world’s asset managers have never been as focused as they are today on bringing AI to their investment processes, but the number of firms who have successfully developed such capabilities in-house remains remarkably low,” Joshua Pantony, chief executive officer of Boosted.ai, said in a statement. “For virtually all other managers, a lack of time, money and talent will prevent machine learning from becoming a core competency or true differentiator. We have spent the past five years building Boosted Insights to solve for that gap in a way that is understandable and explainable to all styles of portfolio managers and allocators.”