AlphaSense acquires Y Combinator-backed Carousel, an AI assistant for Excel

• Fintech company AlphaSense has acquired Carousel, an AI assistant for building financial models in Excel.
• AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko told BI that “AI isn’t replacing analysts, it’s giving them superpowers.”
• AlphaSense says it just hit $500 million in annual revenue and has 6,500 corporate clients.

As Silicon Valley chases the next frontier in technology, one classic tool still reigns supreme: Microsoft Excel.

That’s why business intelligence platform AlphaSense is acquiring Carousel, the New York-based startup behind an AI assistant that generates financial spreadsheets and builds models in Excel.

AlphaSense declined to disclose specific financial details about the deal, but AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko told Business Insider in an interview that the company just crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue and now has 6,500 corporate clients. AlphaSense launched in 2011 and is valued at $4 billion, according to PitchBook.

Kokko said the Carousel’s entire team will be integrated with AlphaSense, and they’ll be focused on developing AI-powered spreadsheet generation tools.

Carousel, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, was founded by Daniel Wolf and Jude Rizzo in 2023.

“Carousel eliminates the most tedious parts of an analyst’s workflow — extracting data from PDFs and presentations, formatting models, building formulas, and explaining complex logic,” AlphaSense said in an announcement of the acquisition.

AI gives analysts ‘superpowers’

Kokko said that the company has seen “hypergrowth” over the last four quarters due to the tailwinds of generative AI.

The Carousel deal follows the company’s acquisition of Tegus, a provider of research, financial data, and workflow tools, for $930 million in 2024. That acquisition shifted AlphaSense’s client base more toward financial services firms, Kokko said. So, the company saw opportunity in automating more aspects of these firms’ work —especially modeling.

Right now, a typical AlphaSense user might leverage the platform to pull anywhere from dozens to thousands of data points from original documents to manually build a model. The company says the integration of Carousel will allow those same users to automate many of those steps through a conversational interface.

Kokko said the integration of Carousel is more likely to impact the work of its clients’ entry-level workers.

“At least in the early stages, this technology will mostly be used by junior and midlevel employees — the ones actually doing the modeling today,” he said. “AI isn’t replacing analysts — it’s giving them superpowers.”

Generative AI, Kokko said, is quickly changing the way work gets done in the financial services industry — much like the way Excel rapidly expanded the number of analysts in the industry.

“It didn’t replace analysts — it created an explosion in the number of analysts, ” he said about Excel. “This will do the same, letting people model more scenarios in less time.”

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