Bridgetown Research CEO and founder Harsh Sahai
The inspiration for Harsh Sahai, the CEO and founder of Bridgetown Research, came from two previous roles. Bridgetown, which is today unveiling a $19 million Series A funding round, is very much the product of Sahai’s CV, spanning the consultancy McKinsey and the tech giant Amazon.
At McKinsey, Sahai led the consultant’s strategy engagements; at Amazon, he ran machine learning teams. What if, he reasoned, he could fuse those two experiences to deliver a different kind of strategic service to businesses?
“Once a business reaches a certain scale, there are a handful of key decision it must make which will determine it fate – whether it thrives or survives,” Sahai explains. “To make those decisions, you need the ability to build and analyse a really specific set of key data; unfortunately, that is currently far too expensive for all but the largest organisations.”
To put that another way, small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the budget to hire Sahai’s former employer McKinsey or another expensive consultancy service, even though the strategic decisions they must make are existential. Nor do they have access to the sort of machine learning capabilities that Sahai once oversaw at Amazon.
Bridgetown therefore attempts to replicate those competencies with a service that these growing businesses can afford. “We want to ensure that all businesses have access to the data and insight they need to make the really big decisions,” Sahai explains.
The company achieves that goal through three sets of agents powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Team one is responsible for gathering critical data on behalf the business; Bridgetown’s AI agents are able to automatically scour a range of proprietary data sources for mission-critical data, and even to automate research calls to experts paid to give their views and advice. A second team of AI agents is then responsible for processing all this data – conducting the analysis to produce the outputs need in order to make a decision. The final piece in the jigsaw is a team of AI agents that is responsible for reporting – generating advice to the business that it can use as it weighs its big decision.
Businesses pay a subscription fee to use the platform, which covers the cost of data analysis and reporting. They then pay additional fees, depending on usage, for the original data research. The goal is to produce high-quality strategic advice at a price smaller organisations can afford.
“What you end up with is a McKinsey-style report, with the depth and breadth you need to make a key business decision,” Sahai says. “That report is based on primary data that we analyse systematically to generate original insights.”
The use cases for such a platform are wide-ranging, but Bridgetown has chosen to start with one specific decision that often faces growing businesses – whether or not to make a particular acquisition. The technology can automatically analyse a potential takeover target to provide strategic advice on whether it represents a good fit for the business, given its current state and its future objectives.
That use case has seen Bridgetown win contracts from a number of private equity firms, which are constantly making decisions about whether to invest in new businesses, as well as from corporate M&A departments. While the firm only launched commercially in the second half of last year, it has already brought in more than $1 million of revenues.
Today’s fundraising will enable Bridgetown to start expanding its services – to source a wider range of proprietary data, for example, and to explore more ambitious use cases for the technology. The Series A round is led by the venture capital firms Lightspeed and Accel, which will provide strategic partnership as well as funding.
“Companies are built on the quality of strategic decisions, and the research and analysis behind it,” says Ishaan Preet Singh, an investor at Lightspeed. “Bridgetown enables the smartest executives and investors to make these decisions with an order of magnitude more information, and at a pace that was earlier impossible.”
At Accel, investor Anagh Prasad adds: “AI is causing widespread disruptions across many enterprise functions, and Bridgetown Research is riding that wave by assisting executives in making important strategic decisions.”
Sahai says he is particularly motivated by working on an AI proposition designed to support growth and create value, rather than to reduce costs. “We think there is an element of conscious capital about what we’re doing,” he explains. “So many AI tools are really about cutting costs by replacing people’s livelihoods, but we’re more focused on driving business growth – and therefore on job creation.”