Only have 1 minute? Here are 3 key takeaways from the piece:
• Bulgarian startup Eilla AI secured $1.5 million in seed from lead investor Eleven Ventures and joined by Fuel Ventures.
• The platform automates mundane tasks related to financial research, analysis, and document creation by mimicking industry professionals.
• With a growing user base from over 50 M&A banks and VC and PE funds, the company plans to use the funding to expand its team and to scale its offerings.
Eilla AI’s story begins in a perhaps an unlikely place, in the Bulgarian town of Veliko Tarnovo, where all of its founders – Nikola Lazarov (CEO), Petar Petrov (CCO), Nikolay Babulkov (CTO) – grew up together. Later, two more founders from the same town joined the team – Filip Siderov as a software architect and Nikolay Papazov as a CFO. All of them with a certain commercial or technical experience in the financial world.
“We sat next to each other (with Petar) for five years and studied informatics and mathematics at Vasil Drumev High School of Natural Science and Mathematics in Veliko Tarnovo. Needless to say, we are very good friends. After high school, we both majored in artificial intelligence and always discussed trends in the industry,” Lazarov tells The Recursive.
Today, Nikola, Petar and Nikolay live together in London, from where they operate Eilla AI and come up with solutions for the many old and new problems that the financial industry conjures. The startup also has a presence in Sofia, with two of its members situated there.
Getting rid of the tedious tasks
Most of these issues often relate to tedious tasks that junior professionals in financial firms have to do. Eilla AI solves such issues by efficiently analyzing crucial data and generating comprehensive reports.
“The biggest issue we see in the industry is that so much energy and time is spent on repetitive, mundane tasks that can easily be automated, especially at the junior level. Instead of manually gathering and analyzing information for hours, something like mapping out a market could be done in a matter of seconds. In addition, the industry is slow to adapt to new technologies and there are not many solutions fit for M&A, VC, and PE,” Lazarov explains.
Aside from using Generative AI to mirror industry professionals and automate processes, the platform also unlocks new insights and supports complex decision-making through aggregation and analysis of large amounts of information in a lot less time than currently possible.
Eilla AI’s potential was therefore quickly recognized by investors such as Eleven Ventures, who acknowledged its, as they say, talented team with unique expertise in deep AI and M&A domain knowledge.
“The daily work of M&A, VC, and PE professionals hasn’t evolved much in the past 30 years, dominated by lots of manual data retrieval and analysis, as well as mundane document creation. Eilla’s Generative AI platform is a total game-changer, which will provide superhuman productivity. What previously took hours and days will take minutes, enabling people to focus on human interactions instead,” Svetozar Georgiev, general partner at Eleven Ventures, said in a statement.
Expanding the team and positioning for growth
According to Lazarov, the company will use the fresh funding to further expand its team, and also further position itself on the markets that it targets.
“This funding will be vital as we aim to expand our technical team and product offering, while also positioning the business for growth across the M&A, venture capital, and private equity markets,” he said.
The Bulgarian startup is also looking at novel AI trends that could revolutionize how M&A, VCs and PEs operate in general.
“We believe that the ability to quickly analyze the finest detail of a single company while also researching thousands of businesses in a matter of minutes would allow for a much more systematic and consistent way of advising and investing. Other examples would be researching a company and its competitors for the creation of a company profile or analyzing funds’ portfolio. In the future, we plan to support more complex tasks such as the build of financial models, client KPIs analysis, etc.” Lazarov concludes.
