Pinegap, an AI-powered equity research platform that automates the daily workflows of institutional buy-side analysts, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. New Funding to Help Company Scale and Expand Team Capabilities. Pinegap, an AI-powered equity research platform that automates the daily workflows of institutional buy-side analysts, has raised $8 million in Series A to scale across hedge funds, long-only mutual funds, and registered investment advisors (RIAs) in the United States. The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Inventus, Silicon Valley Quad, and DeVC. The funding will be used to build out Pinegap’s go-to-market and sales capabilities, expand its engineering team, and set up an in-house team of former equity research analysts. Pinegap works directly with fund teams to understand their research processes, investment theses, and workflows – then builds custom AI agents tuned to each fund’s investment style, private data, and output formats. Agents are push-based: outputs arrive in the analyst’s inbox on a schedule or triggered by market events, rather than waiting to be queried. Today, Pinegap has deployed more than 1,000 agents across 100+ institutional clients, generating upwards of 50,000 research reports per month. “Buy-side analysts typically cover 20 to 40 companies in their main coverage while monitoring hundreds in their shopping list. Their days are structured around recurring, As institutional asset managers face an era defined by rising data volumes, compressed research cycles, and increasing pressure on returns, Pinegap is building the AI infrastructure that lets analysts do more with the time they have – turning the most repetitive parts of the research process into an engine that runs itself. Pinegap was founded in 2024 by Ankit Varmani, a former JPMorgan analyst and 15-year institutional finance veteran, and Deepak Sharma, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus. The founding insight came from an assignment – Deepak reached out to Ankit, then preparing to launch his own fund, to learn the craft of equity research. Working through the tasks Ankit gave him, Deepak turned to LLMs just beginning to show real capability. The two quickly realised that the most repetitive, time-consuming parts of equity research could be automated with AI – and built Pinegap to give every buy-side fund the tools they’d wished they had on the job.
