American tech entrepreneur Arjun Sethi has been quietly at the forefront of the AI revolution in institutional investing.
Sethi, a two-time tech founder, has spent nearly a decade building an AI software platform for users including sovereign governments, sovereign wealth and pension funds, family offices and private fund managers across both venture capital and private equity firms.
Sethi, a co-founder of Tribe Capital, a venture capital firm, rolled out Termina on Feb. 8, an AI software platform that provide quantitative diligence for investors. It leverages transactional level data from more than 1,500 companies from seed funding to IPO contained in a proprietary database that he built.
"You can think of it as an analyst on steroids," Sethi said. "We have one pension fund that loves it because they want to put in $100 million or $500 million into six or seven names but they want to stay in for the next 20 to 30 years."
"It is the first time they've been able to say, 'I don't have to rely on a GP. I know exactly how this company is performing — and you did it for me in 48 hours vs. even 16 weeks.'"
He declined to name the pension fund.
Sethi has observed that institutional investors understand AI and quantitative methods can provide significant predictability and a reduction in risk across how they allocate and deploy capital.
"But most investors have struggled to deploy AI, technology and quantitative analysis as a driving force in their investment process," he said.
That's largely due to the prohibitive time and cost required and the complexity of adoption, given a lack of experience and precedent, he added.
Termina is leveraging large language models to enhance its analysis and benchmarking capabilities. By utilizing labeled datasets and analysis archives, Termina distills billions of data points to help investors evaluate companies and key drivers of their businesses.
Termina is offering two initial products to help inform investment decisions.
Company-level "8Ball" diligence reports, which are dashboards — think of an individual's medical charts — that allow investors to rapidly quantify the health of any company and compare it across thousands of companies in its proprietary datasets.
These charts go deeper than any analyst can within seconds and days, he said, and serve as predictive signals to help inform investors on buy and sell decisions in sectors ranging from retail/consumer to tech and industrials, benchmarking against measures of unit economics, customer cohorts, growth patterns and product-market fit.
In addition, Termina provides macro-level "Weather" indicator and "Tech Adoption Gauge" reports. The weather reports help investors manage the strategic allocation of time and resources, from liquidity management to sector focus.
These reports measure the supply of capital relative to the demand, allowing investors to estimate upcoming market changes (strategy, capital, talent) and also allowing the tool to navigate secondary markets and associated entries and exits with precision.
The Tech Adoption Gauge quantifies the technology adoption curve, historically known to follow an S-curve of low adoption giving rise to rapid adoption, followed by ubiquity.
"This is truly like an MRI or a CAT scan," Sethi said. "But you're able to rewind back in time to look at, 'What did the CAT scan look like at 1980, 1995, 2005?' at every single juncture and down to the seconds, not one specific year."
