Former JPMorgan Analyst and IIT Alumni-Founded Pinegap Raises $8 Million to Build Custom AI Agents for Institutional Investors

Pinegap, an AI-powered equity research platform that automates the daily workflows of institutional buy-side analysts, has raised $8 million in Series A to scale across hedge funds, long-only mutual funds, and registered investment advisors (RIAs) in the United States.

The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Inventus, Silicon Valley Quad, and DeVC. The funding will be used to build out Pinegap’s go-to-market and sales capabilities, expand its engineering team, and set up an in-house team of former equity research analysts.

Pinegap works directly with fund teams to understand their research processes, investment theses, and workflows – then builds custom AI agents tuned to each fund’s investment style, private data, and output formats. Agents are push-based: outputs arrive in the analyst’s inbox on a schedule or triggered by market events, rather than waiting to be queried. Today, Pinegap has deployed more than 1,000 agents across 100+ institutional clients, generating upwards of 50,000 research reports per month.

“Buy-side analysts typically cover 20 to 40 companies in their main coverage while monitoring hundreds in their shopping list. Their days are structured around recurring,

high-stakes workflows that are still largely done by hand,” said Deepak Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Pinegap. “Every workflow we automate, whether it's an earnings preview, a company primer, or a thesis tracker, is time an analyst gets back to focus on what only they can do: judgment, conviction, and decisions. Pinegap isn't a chatbot or a search tool. It's a platform built around how a fund actually operates, tuned to their data, their format, and their investment style.”

As institutional asset managers face an era defined by rising data volumes, compressed research cycles, and increasing pressure on returns, Pinegap is building the AI infrastructure that lets analysts do more with the time they have – turning the most repetitive parts of the research process into an engine that runs itself.

“Buy-side analysts and portfolio managers are among the most intellectually demanding and capacity-constrained professionals in financial services, and the tools they rely on have not kept pace with the volume and complexity of what they manage,” said Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners. “Pinegap is solving a real, high-stakes problem with a team that has lived it from both sides, the domain depth of a career analyst combined with the technical velocity of a product builder. What they have built in a short period of time, and the caliber of funds already using it, speaks for itself.”

Pinegap was founded in 2024 by Ankit Varmani, a former JPMorgan analyst and 15-year institutional finance veteran, and Deepak Sharma, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus. The founding insight came from an assignment – Deepak reached out to Ankit, then preparing to launch his own fund, to learn the craft of equity research. Working through the tasks Ankit gave him, Deepak turned to LLMs just beginning to show real capability. The two quickly realised that the most repetitive, time-consuming parts of equity research could be automated with AI – and built Pinegap to give every buy-side fund the tools they’d wished they had on the job.