We sat down with Glean AI’s Ankur Patel to discuss managing business costs with AI, running an AI-powered hedge fund, culture at Bridgewater, building the remote-first company, and the future generative AI. 

Ankur is a co-founder and head of data at Glean AI. Glean uses natural language processing to deliver vendor spend intelligence within an accounts payable solution. Before founding Glean, Ankur was the vice president of data science at 7Park Data, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company. 

Ankur used alternative data to build data products for hedge funds and developed a natural language processing-based entity recognition, resolution, and linking platform for enterprise clients. Before 7Park Data, Ankur led data science efforts in New York City for Israeli artificial intelligence firm ThetaRay, a pioneer in applied unsupervised learning. 

Ankur began his career as an analyst at J.P. Morgan and then became the lead emerging markets sovereign credit trader for Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest global macro hedge fund. He later founded and managed R-Squared Macro, a machine learning-based hedge fund. 

Ankur is the author of Hands-on Unsupervised Learning Using Python and Applied Natural Language Processing in the Enterprise, both O’Reilly Media publications. 

Glean is backed by Contour Venture Partners, Infinity Ventures, B Capital, Portage Ventures, Amex Ventures, and other prominent venture funds and fintech angels. 

The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts: https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/ 

0:00 - Why start a career on Wall Street 

03:55 - Key takeaways from Bridgewater's approach to culture 

05:55 - How to build an AI-powered hedge fund 

08:25 - Can a data edge be sustainable for a hedge fund 

10:35 - Data-driven hedge fund horizon 

13:30 - How should an individual investor think about the market and edge 

17:10 - How Glean helps organizations manage expenses with peer intelligence 

24:10 - Scaling spend analytics  

29:00 - Offering Glean functionality as a set of APIs 

36:00 - AI technologies powering Glean 

40:35 - Solving the “cold start” problem with training data 

43:30 - Raising a multi-million seed round pre-product and pre-revenue 

48:00 - Managing the growth, fighting the pressure of growth-at-all-costs 

52:20 - To build a strong culture focus on what motivates people 

56:00 - Adapting the culture to the remote-first environment  

1:00:00 - Think about how acquiring data makes a product better 

1:05:00 - The future of generative AI and multi-modal models 

Company: https://www.glean.ai/  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aapatel09  

Newsletter: https://www.ankursnewsletter.com/  

At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com   

With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com