Portrait Analytics, a startup building a generative artificial intelligence-powered research platform for investment analysts, said early today that it has closed on a $3 million pre-seed funding round.

Today’s round was led by .406 Ventures and saw participation from a number of unnamed partners at leading hedge funds.

The startup is attempting to bring the power of generative AI, which refers to systems that can generate text and images from written prompts, to the world of investment analysts, who have long been overwhelmed by information overload. They’re under continual pressure to stay current on all of the companies within their coverage area, and that means spending endless hours reading through various documents and filings. Speed and timing matters, and that makes it an area that’s ripe for AI-powered assistance.

To that end, Portrait Analytics is developing a question-and-answer-based application that incorporates both the search and the summarization capabilities of generative AI as a way to be an assistant to analysts. Analysts can ask it questions or command it to perform various tasks, which it will do by extracting and assessing the key information they need from within a mountain of documents and filings.

The responses it comes up with are said to be clear and factual and can be fully audited. In this way, Portrait Analytics believes its Q&A assistant will eventually be able to fulfill the role of a junior investment analyst, pitching ideas, writing memos and building financial models.

One advantage of Portrait Analytics is that its co-founder and Chief Executive David Plon knows exactly what kind of assistance analysts are looking for, since he spent almost five years as a principal analyst on the public markets team at the hedge fund Baupost Group LLC.

Plon explained that during his tenure at Baupost, he was always under pressure and never had enough time to research all of the companies he came across or fully investigate a thesis. “At Portrait, we’re building the personal research assistant I always wished I had, one that would massively expand my bandwidth for finding and consuming information critical to the investment research process,” he said.

Portrait said analysts can sign up to access its platform in private beta now, with availability set to follow in the coming months.

Liam Donohue, co-founder and managing partner of .406 Ventures, said he has spoken to dozens of investment analysts to understand their painstaking and inefficient research processes. “Over and again they lamented the lack of a technology solution that could help them make better decisions faster,” he said. “The experience, expertise and vision that David and his team bring to building Portrait will be transformative in solving this massive and important problem.”

Image: Portrait Analytics