Our investment in Bridgetown: AI super-power for making strategic decisions
Within a few quarters of the population-scale launch of LLMs (aka ChatGPT), AI has already permeated business workflows across the board and created unprecedented levels of productivity-linked business value. Whether it’s a legal AI tool choosing the correct clause in a case document or a coding assistant generating optimal code for a module, a well-built AI tool helps users make several (often hundreds of) micro-decisions daily. What if AI could go an order of magnitude further in impact and start assisting users in making major strategic decisions? Decisions like should a fast-growing software firm acquire its biggest competitor, or does an enterprise need a rejig of its C-level, or should a PE firm invest $400M in a seemingly attractive asset.
Such decisions are, by nature, critical but infrequent and highly bespoke—each needing not just proprietary, precise, and contextual data but also a high level of insight and business acumen. Consequently, the role of software (AI or not) here has been relatively limited for decades. Bridgetown Research is poised to change that with significant innovations around how decision-makers collect, synthesise, and leverage primary and secondary research data. While there are several tools in the market today for retrieving and summarising historical data and web search results, Bridgetown has believed from Day 1 that creating tangible and attributable value for increasing speed and quality of decision-making will need AI agents that can source net new data, understand domain-specific ontologies, and are dextrous at figuring signal from noise. Their competitive edge comes from combining the data processing & reasoning capabilities of frontier LLMs with a family of proprietary, domain-specific models fine-tuned by expert professionals.
We are excited to partner with Harsh, who, with his background as a seasoned Amazon AI scientist turned ace McKinsey consultant, brings a unique blend of skills and insight needed to imagine a whole new category of applied AI. As partners from the inception stage, we have been pleased to see how Bridgetown’s platform has garnered quick adoption from several Tier-1 private equity firms for deal diligences, and established early presence among consulting firms and enterprise corporate strategy teams.
Management consulting firms assisting businesses in decision-making make over $350B annually in the US alone. The eventual addressable market for AI in this category should be even larger as AI lowers the barriers to accessing contextual expertise. We wish team Bridgetown Research the best in achieving their vision of empowering decision-makers everywhere!