Centauri AI
The Modern ETL and Data Science Platform for Finance
Centauri AI is a modern ETL and Data Science platform for banks and investment firms, starting with Structured Finance. Financial firms heavily rely on Excel, PDF, and PPT files to exchange complex asset details, leading analysts to spend hours crunching the files and extracting insights. Moreover, these data files and reports cannot be easily reused due to poor data infrastructure. Powered by AI, our product cuts hours of data wrangling work down to minutes and makes it possible to query past data easily. This helps firms evaluate assets faster and win more deals. Since launching last month, we've started a pilot with a brokerage team at a public investment bank that now uses our product daily. Aiming to serve over 100,000 investment teams needing complex data analysis for alternative investments, this opens up a potential $5 billion market.
Active Founders
He Lu
He is the co-founder and CEO of Centauri AI with 9 years of experience in banking and capital market. Before Centauri AI, he was co-founder and CTO of Blue Water Fintech, which achieved $11M in annual net revenue before its acquisition in 2022. Previously, he managed five institutional fixed-income portfolios as a portfolio manager. He likes tennis and running. He is also a member of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office search and rescue team.
Milan Shen
Milan is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Centauri AI. Milan has expertise in Data and AI over 10 years with both research and product development. After obtaining a PhD in Statistics from Stanford, she led DS for Pricing and Forecasting powering over 1 million listings at Airbnb. More recently at Meta as a research scientist manager, she led the team to deploy Facebook Ads system’s first privacy-preserving AI solution (approx $0.5B+ yearly incremental revenue).
James Wu
James was a Director of Engineering at Tubi, hired the Platform Eng. Team, managed a >1500c autoscaling K8s cluster and oversaw costs for a $x0M/year tech budget. Principal Engineer at Minted as a full-stack DevSecOps developer. UC Berkeley Alum.
Company Launches
TL;DR: Centauri AI is a modern data platform for institutional investors to process and analyze complex investment asset data, starting with Structured Finance. We help investment teams evaluate assets faster and win more deals by turning 2-3 hours of data extracting, mapping, and analysis work under minutes. Contact us here.
🔥 The Problem
The Structured Finance industry suffers from antiquated technology, particularly in mortgage securitization. Lenders and investors deal with inefficient processes, using emails and Excel files to exchange complex information on mortgage-backed securities and other assets. This requires manual or outdated software for data mapping and transformation, consuming significant time (2-3 hours daily) even for experienced professionals. Similar inefficiencies are present in other Alternative Investment sectors like Private Credit, Private Equity, and Real Estate, where analysts wade through extensive documents for deal analysis and portfolio updates.
✨ Our Solution
We envision bringing a modern ETL and data science platform built natively with AI to this traditional industry. Traders and analysts can centralize, standardize, and gain insights quickly from all the data they handle without wrangling with copy-pasting between numerous PDFs and Excel files. We believe that equipped with the right tools purpose-built for data in structured finance, AI agents can perform on par or better than humans on these mundane tasks.
⚙️ How it works
Extract
Drop your CSV, PDF, or Excel files into our upload hub. The agent automatically detects the structured tables and indexes unstructured text. Later, these tables are ready for data-cutting and modeling.
Transform
Our AI agent is built for data mapping. It identifies and explains data fields in natural language and writes code to map them to the desirable output format.
Analyze
Our first-of-its-kind analysis agent is equipped with features designed for ad-hoc exploratory analysis. You can auto-run, rewind, or branch out a generative report at any given time to get more insights easily.
Present
We support exporting the transformed data and analysis findings as a nice dashboard or customized in your way, such as in well-formatted Excel sheets. More customized-style exporting is on the roadmap!
Our Team
He was the co-founder and CTO of Blue Water Fintech, which generated $18M ARR before being acquired in 2022. He experienced the inefficiency of data processing and analytics tasks firsthand when he managed 5 institutional trading books as a portfolio manager.
After obtaining a PhD in Statistics from Stanford, Milan led DS for Pricing and Forecasting, powering over 1 million listings at Airbnb. More recently, at Meta, as a research scientist manager, she led the deployment of Facebook Ads system’s first privacy-preserving AI solution (approx $0.5B+ yearly incremental revenue).
James is a UC Berkeley Alumni in Computer Science and was a Director of Engineering at Tubi, hired the Platform Eng Team managing a >1500c autoscaling K8s cluster and oversaw costs for a $x0M/year tech budget. He was also Principal Engineer at Minted as a full-stack DevSecOps developer.
Together, we’re excited to help bring the modern data stack powered by AI to financial firms.
🙏 Asks
- If you are in the financial industry and processing large amounts of Excel and PDF files is part of your daily life, we would love to hear your product feedback! Please book a demo here.
- If you know any leaders in investment firms such as private credit or private equity, please connect us!
- If you know any Directors or VPs responsible for trading or managing Whole Loans, Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO), or Asset Backed Securities (ABS) in any banks or asset management firms, please connect us! Email us at he.lu@centauri-ai.tech