London-based Eilla AI, a generative AI platform designed to assist M&A, venture capital (VC), and private equity (PE) professionals with financial research, analysis, and document creation, has raised $1.5m in seed funding as it looks to grow the team and scale the company and its offering. The funding round was led by Eleven Ventures and supported by Fuel Ventures, with additional investment from Mark Pearson, Founder & Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures, in an individual capacity.
For M&A advisors and investors, one of the biggest time constraints is the volume of mundane tasks associated with the deal workflow. Eilla AI’s technology automates these processes by mirroring industry professionals using generative AI. The platform also unlocks new insights and supports complex decision-making through aggregation and analysis of large amounts of information from various sources in significantly less time than is currently possible.
AI is rapidly transforming the global financial industry, which is second only to the tech sector in terms of AI investment and spend. With this trend set to continue, new verticalised financial AI companies such as Eilla AI are well positioned to quickly refine the industry. To date, Eilla AI has been used by advisors and investors from more than 50 M&A banks and VC and PE funds to help optimise specific tasks by researching, aggregating, and analysing information from key industry sources and internal data.
Nikola Lazarov, CEO at Eilla AI, said: “The bottom line is that financial professionals are paid to think, not waste time on mundane tasks. But the amount of time and effort it takes a junior at a financial firm to map out the companies in a specific industry, for example, can spiral quickly. We tackle this problem by analysing all of the essential information and then providing a report in the appropriate format for our clients. This funding will be vital as we aim to expand our technical team and product offering, while also positioning the business for growth across the M&A, venture capital, and private equity markets.”
Svetozar Georgiev, General Partner at Eleven Ventures, said: “The daily work of M&A, VC and PE professionals hasn’t evolved much in the past 30 years, dominated by lots of manual data retrieval and analysis, as well as mundane document creation. Eilla’s generative AI platform is a total game-changer, which will provide superhuman productivity. What previously took hours and days will take minutes, enabling people to focus on human interactions instead. We are excited to be leading Eilla AI’s seed funding round and work with its talented team, which uniquely combines deep AI expertise with M&A domain knowledge.”
Mark Pearson, Founding Partner at Fuel Ventures, said: “It was immediately clear from our own experiences in Venture Capital that Eilla’s innovative, AI driven approach will save a substantial amount of time and resources. Eilla will enable us in VC and others across PE, Corporate Finance and beyond to really focus on actually adding value. We’re excited to be investing alongside Eleven Ventures, and are looking forward to building something great with the enormously talented Eilla team.”
Nikola Lazarov, the co-founder and CEO of Eilla AI, is a University of Cambridge graduate with a Master’s thesis focusing on a predecessor of ChatGPT and Generative AI. His expertise extends to working as a Quant in a London-based hedge fund, where he developed and optimised trading strategies with AI. Prior to Eilla AI, Nikola led the AI team in a YC-backed tech startup.
Petar Petrov, the co-founder and CCO of Eilla AI, brings a wealth of experience. He previously co-founded a business with Nikola Lazarov and Nikolay Papazov (CFO @ Eilla AI), emphasising marketing. In his most recent role, Petar led Growth and Revenue Ops in the SaaS startup Vita Mojo, guiding it from Series A to Series B, raising 30 million from Battery Ventures.
Nikolay Babulkov, the co-founder and CTO of Eilla AI, is an ML & software engineer with a Master’s degree in AI from the University of Sofia. During his academic journey, he contributed to various research papers, some of which were presented at prestigious NLP/AI conferences like ACL & CLEF.
The founders’ paths crossed in diverse ways. Nikola Lazarov and Petar Petrov, both young entrepreneurs, share close family connections. Nikola Lazarov and Nikolay Babulkov’s friendship dates back to their years studying Computer Science and Mathematics at Veliko Tarnovo’s Mathematical High School, fostering a strong bond. Post high school, they specialized in AI, engaging in continuous discussions about industry trends.
