Blog
by Tiffany Luck, Maanasi Garg and James KaplanMay 14, 2025
Financial services firms have long been believers and major consumers of data and vertical-specific technology solutions. This has already been a huge opportunity given this industry's massive scale. The $30T+ financial services industry(1) is a cornerstone of the global economy, powering the flow of capital for individuals and businesses worldwide and accounting for 20-30%+ of global GDP(2). Leading players like Bloomberg, S&P’s Capital IQ, and FactSet have accrued $80Bn+ in value. While these companies provide access to the data, well-paid analysts still manually perform the majority of data synthesis, knowledge contextualization, and quantitative analysis via Microsoft Office and often outdated PowerPoint or Excel templates that their teams have been handing down for a decade.
Now, the status quo of financial knowledge work and its tech stack is ready to change. With generative AI’s ability to understand and reason across diverse data formats, it’s finally possible to intelligently automate these remaining manual steps, and to allow financial professionals to focus on insight generation and decision making.
Today, we're excited to announce our lead investment in Samaya AI’s $43.5M financing and to support a team that is making this a reality and redefining how financial services professionals work. Samaya is developing a suite of expert AI agents designed and trained for complex financial workflows, from investment research to client advisory and deal diligence. They are seeing 100% month-over-month growth in usage(3), and already serve large customers such as Morgan Stanley. Revolutionizing financial services is a massive opportunity, and we believe the Samaya team has the right DNA to meet the challenge.
Although horizontal agents may be helpful with sub-tasks like document search, true end-to-end automation in financial services workflows warrants a dedicated vertical solution that understands the intricacies of the industry due to several complexities:
Dispersed and specialized data sources: financial workflows involve not just public filings of varying formats but also paid research, alternative data, and internal data. Automating workflows on top of these various sources will require targeted efforts toward building context, partnerships and integrations
Precision: these are high-stakes workflows, and the consequences for inaccuracies are significant. It is uniquely important to architect financial services agents for minimal hallucinations and omission of key information
Auditability: even AI solutions that are end-to-end will need to be designed for quick but granular human auditing of the AI’s sources and reasoning
Last-mile work: senior decision makers expect information to be presented in precise formatting that matches decades of institutional conventions. The right AI solution will need to encode these preferences flexibly into its outputs
Purpose-built, domain-specific solutions like Samaya AI that specifically build agents to handle these complexities will be required for larger scale adoption of AI in financial services.
Building expert knowledge agents for financial services that can synthesize data to complete end-to-end tasks is a deeply technical challenge.
Samaya’s use of multiple specialized, proprietary models that retrieve, contextualize and reason in tandem allows its agents to have the right context to be immediately useful and to perform at the level of a true knowledge worker. The Samaya agents are already capable of autonomously synthesizing sector-wide investment reports and creating investment presentations by reasoning over proprietary documents.
Samaya is also announcing the launch of Causal World Models that autonomously model the entire economy and provide quantitative predictions for challenging questions, such as “What is the impact of the tariffs on US GDP and the economy?” See visual below.
Samaya was founded by an exceptionally technical team with deep AI expertise and laser product focus. Founder and CEO, Maithra Raghu, was an early member of Google Brain, spending over six years there studying deep learning systems after completing her PhD in machine learning from Cornell, and has collaborated with leaders in the AI field, including Jeff Dean and Geoffrey Hinton. The founding team is filled with top-tier AI talent from Google Brain, Stanford, AWS and other leading institutions. They’ve had incredible impact in the field of Knowledge AI, from co-authoring the original RAG paper to the first studies on Long Context LLMs to breakthroughs in improving the instructability of retrieval LLMs.
The concentration of technical expertise on this team will be critical as they tackle the most challenging aspects of delivering expert AI knowledge agents. We believe Samaya is building a winning AI platform for financial services, and we’re beyond excited to partner with Maithra and the rest of the remarkable team to power the long awaited transformation of this industry!
Samaya AI is hiring! If you’d like to join this dynamic team, check out open roles on their careers page.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be investment advice, or recommendation, or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by NEA or any other NEA entity. New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, nothing in this post should be interpreted to suggest that the SEC has endorsed or approved the contents of this post. NEA has no obligation to update, modify, or amend the contents of this post nor to notify readers in the event that any information, opinion, forecast or estimate changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate or outdated. In addition, certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources and has not been independently verified by NEA. Any statements made by founders, investors, portfolio companies, or others in the post or on other third-party websites referencing this post are their own, and are not intended to be an endorsement of the investment advisory services offered by NEA.
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Sources
1. Research and Markets, Financial Services Market Report 2025
2. Based on IMF April 2025 GDP outlook of ~$114T
3. Samaya AI