At Lightspeed, we believe that AI will dramatically change services. Dev Khare and I have been exploring and investing behind this thesis over the past year with investments in Gushwork, Pepper Content and a few more still in stealth.
Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Bridgetown Research, which is building research agents to help businesses make better strategic decisions, starting with private equity, consulting and IT research.
Dev and I met Harsh Sahai when we were working on our AI + Services thesis. We already believed AI was opening up a much larger service TAM for software companies, and our work gave us a few thoughts on what such businesses should focus on – a) build for massive TAMs, but start with very specific use cases, b) enable 10x better outcomes c) leverage humans in the loop but build a strong technology platform, d) focus on a fast or medium velocity wedge and e) open up new demand.
After that first meeting, we walked away realising Harsh and the team at Bridgetown smashed through all these focus areas. Bridgetown had started with helping private equity firms run faster and better due diligence by leveraging AI to actually do primary research, along with secondary and synthesis, helping PE investors get a high quality DD report in 24 hours instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost. This helps investors get deep on more companies and frees up time to actually focus on the high stakes decisions.
A real (sanitised) Bridgetown report
How Bridgetown achieves this is very special – Bridgetown’s AI agents start with secondary research and publicly available data but then use in-house expertise & frameworks on markets built by real experts along to create hypotheses. The agents then go iterate on these by collecting fresh information from customers before creating a synthesised report – charts, quotes et al. While there are tens of research agents, including some products we love such as Deep Research, they are focussed on search and synthesis. The sector expertise, hypothesis creation and information collection, make Bridgetown’s work much more relevant as an input to key decisions.
This atomic unit is extremely powerful, and encompasses research and analysis work that takes place way beyond private equity. This research and analysis is a core input for many teams – public and private market investors, management consulting firms, multiple corporate teams such as corporate strategy marketing, IT and even HR. Harsh recognised this on day 1, but focussed on a core use case as the wedge, and completely knocked it out of the park, before expanding.
Now let’s look at Bridgetown from our earlier lenses – a) research and analysis is a massive market with over $400Bn of spend with multiple companies (e.g. McKinsey, Gartner, Qualitrics) raking in billions in annual revenue, b) Bridgetown enables an order of magnitude faster diligence process, c) leverages consultants to ensure quality but has also built some amazing technology that automates the vast majority of the work, d) it’s 1-2 days of work and the RoI is instantly visible and e) investors actually want to do more diligences once they see what’s possible.
And most importantly, Harsh lives and breathes this problem – he’s run diligences and consulting projects at McKinsey, and is a data scientist himself having led ML teams at Amazon. As we got to know him over the next few months, we were blown away by both his execution velocity and scale of ambition. Every time we met him or connected him to a potential customer, we would learn something new about what Bridgetown is doing, and they’ve scaled to multiple marquee customers with large enterprise spends in barely a few months.
We eventually started chatting with Harsh about how we could accelerate this journey, and we’re excited to be leading the latest round of financing, which you can read about more here. Also, if you’re an investor, consultant or strategy executive, this will absolutely change how you work – visit Bridgetown Research
