Auquan: Unlocking Smarter Decisions with AI.

Can you tell me more about Auquan’s mission? Auquan is an AI startup. We enable customers in services like hedge funds, investments banks, private equity funds, to make better and faster decisions. We do so by getting the relevant information from a mountain of data significantly faster that they would manually.

What that means is 3 things. •They have access to a lot more of underlying data to make their decisions faster than they would earlier. They can also get access to information they usually wouldn’t be able to find because it’s impossible to make the connections our system is capable of. •We use natural language processing and machine learning in order to connect to all of the world’s unstructured text, and we run it through our language processing model. Then we connect it to what we store internally which are company and people ecosystems, and we create an online store of information that is accurate and free of noise. •We filter out the noise to surface only the most important information for a user.

How can AI help professionals in investment banking, private equity, asset management, and other financial institutions find hidden value in an overwhelming amount of noisy, seemingly worthless data? There is indeed a lot of noisy, seemingly worthless data. The problem is today a lot of that work is done manually. I’ve heard again and again from my customers that their research team spends time just gathering, processing, and cleaning data. Their team will spend too much time reading and saying whether something is useful or not, which is not a good use of their time.

Why have you come to CogX and what do you take from this experience? I’m just amazed about how mainstream AI is now. Last year no one was talking about it. For my friends in other sectors, such as banking, consulting or even creative fields, AI was in a whole separate world. Today, they are all using tools such as ChatGPT or Midjourney. The audience at CogX has changed significantly from last year, with more people not coming from a technical field but still interested in AI, which I think is quite amazing.

Are there people who have inspired you? Yes, my mother. Growing up in India, I encountered families where women were not meant to have serious careers. My parents have raised me in a “gender neutral” environment. Growing up, I never had this idea that “men and women are different”. My mother is now the first one to introduce robotic surgery in her state, and is also running her entire department. It’s never been boys do this or boys do that, it’s been “people” do that.

Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs? I left my previous job because I wanted to start my own company. I would not recommend anyone to start like that. You should really have something in place, either an idea or a co-founder, or something grounding. I feel like I spent too much time in the early days spending energy on everything instead of having a structure.