NEW YORK / BENGALURU — Pinegap, an AI-powered equity research platform, has raised $8 Mn (over ₹76 Cr) in a Series A funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers Inventus, Silicon Valley Quad and DeVC. The New York-headquartered startup, which also operates a technology centre in Bengaluru, will use the fresh capital to build out its go-to-market and sales capabilities, expand its engineering team, and set up an in-house team of former equity research analysts.
Founded in 2024 by former JPMorgan analyst Ankit Varmani and IIT-BHU alumnus Deepak Sharma, Pinegap operates an agentic AI platform for institutional equity analysts and portfolio managers working across hedge funds, long-only mutual funds and registered investment advisors, primarily targeting Wall Street clientele. The company said it has deployed more than 1,000 AI agents across over 100 institutional clients, generating upwards of 50,000 research reports per month.
Push-Based Agents, Not a Chatbot
"Every workflow we automate — whether it's an earnings preview, a company primer, or a thesis tracker — is the time an analyst gets back to focus on what only they can do: judgment, conviction, and decisions," Pinegap co-founder and CEO Deepak Sharma said. "Pinegap isn't a chatbot or a search tool." The platform works directly with fund teams to understand their research processes and investment theses, then builds custom AI agents tuned to each fund's investment style, private data and output formats. Crucially, the agents are push-based: outputs arrive in an analyst's inbox on a schedule or are triggered by market events, rather than waiting to be queried.
From a Fund Launch to a Research Automation Startup
The founders connected when Sharma, an erstwhile entrepreneur-in-residence at FalconX Gateway, was preparing to launch a fund of his own. The duo turned to large language models to streamline the repetitive, time-consuming parts of equity research — a process that ultimately led to Pinegap's founding, built around the premise of giving every buy-side fund the automation tools that only the largest institutions could previously afford to build in-house.
"The hard part isn't the intelligence layer. It's the workflow layer," said Alok Goyal, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, describing the investment thesis behind the round. As AI models become more widely accessible, Pinegap is betting that its real competitive advantage will come not from having access to better models, but from understanding how institutional analysts actually work and embedding deeply into their investment research workflows — a defensibility strategy increasingly common among AI-native startups navigating a landscape where the underlying model layer is rapidly commoditising.
Riding a Broader Wave of Agentic AI in Financial Services
Pinegap's raise is part of a broader surge of venture interest in agentic AI tools purpose-built for financial services workflows, an area investors see as particularly well-suited to AI automation given the volume of structured and semi-structured data — earnings transcripts, regulatory filings, market data — that institutional analysts must process daily. Having raised $2.5 Mn in a prior seed round from Inventus Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Quad, Pinegap's total funding now stands at roughly $10.5 Mn, positioning the 19-person team for a significant scale-up in headcount and go-to-market reach.
The startup's dual-location structure — commercial headquarters in New York close to its Wall Street client base, engineering centre in Bengaluru tapping India's deep AI and software talent pool — reflects a now-familiar playbook among Indian-founded startups targeting U.S. enterprise and institutional customers, combining proximity to buyers with cost-efficient, high-quality engineering execution.
Why It Matters
Pinegap's Series A adds to a growing cohort of Indian-founded AI startups building specialised, workflow-embedded tools for high-value professional use cases rather than broad consumer applications — a segment investors increasingly view as more defensible than general-purpose AI products, given the depth of domain understanding required to serve institutional finance clients credibly.
• Pinegap raised $8 Mn in a Series A round led by Stellaris Venture Partners.
• The company has deployed 1,000+ AI agents across 100+ institutional clients, generating 50,000+ research reports monthly.
• Founded in 2024 by ex-JPMorgan analyst Ankit Varmani and IIT-BHU alumnus Deepak Sharma.
• Funds will go toward go-to-market expansion, engineering hiring, and an in-house ex-analyst team.
• Pinegap's total funding now stands at roughly $10.5 Mn.
