Fira

What do they actually do

Fira builds an AI research workspace for investment analysts. It ingests large volumes of PDFs, scanned filings, and Excel files, indexes those sources, and answers natural‑language questions with precise, auditable citations down to the paragraph, table, or cell. It also handles PDF→Excel extraction, generates charts for deliverables, and lets users share deep links to the exact source excerpt or spreadsheet cell so colleagues can verify the evidence (Fira homepage, YC profile).

Out of the box, Fira includes public datasets (e.g., UK Companies House, SEC and international filings, investor presentations) and connects to a firm’s storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Box). It also pulls market materials like news and transcripts; notably, Fira announced a Quartr API integration to bring earnings‑call transcripts and filings into the workflow (Fira homepage, Quartr press release).

The team appears to be running early pilots and demos, with an initial focus on analysts and research teams in the UK. They position the product as an assistant that emphasizes verifiability and audit trails over untraceable outputs, and they highlight enterprise security and compliance commitments as they move upmarket (YC profile, Fira homepage, LinkedIn).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Sell‑side equity research analyst at an investment bank: Spends hours extracting numbers from PDFs/slides and stitching them into Excel models and client decks; needs every figure to be defensible with an exact source. Fira automates table extraction, charting, and provides deep links to the precise paragraph or cell for verification (Fira homepage, YC profile).
• Buy‑side fundamental analyst at a hedge fund or asset manager: Needs fast, reliable multi‑document research across filings, broker notes, and transcripts while preserving traceability. Fira indexes these sources (including transcripts via Quartr) and returns source‑backed answers with citations (Fira homepage, Quartr press release).
• Boutique M&A or corporate finance analyst: Requires clean, formatted financials and calculations from messy PDFs/spreadsheets; manual extraction often breaks formatting and introduces errors. Fira’s PDF→Excel extraction and transparent formulas aim to preserve structure and auditability (Fira homepage).
• Wealth manager or client‑reporting team: Must regularly pull consistent, defensible numbers and charts into client materials; current processes are manual, slow, and hard to reproduce. Fira’s exportable tables, charting, and shareable deep links support repeatable, verifiable deliverables (Fira homepage).
• Head of research / research operations at an investment firm: Concerned about security, compliance, and onboarding (data isolation, DPAs, audit trails). Fira highlights SOC 2/GDPR commitments and not training models on customer data to reduce procurement friction (Fira homepage, YC profile).

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder‑led pilots in the UK: hyper‑target senior sell‑side and buy‑side analysts, ingest their real filings and spreadsheets, and run live demos that show auditable answers and Excel exports on their own data; produce brief case studies from each pilot (Fira homepage, YC profile).
• First 50: Convert pilots to paid seats with basic contracting/pricing and rapid product fixes; use pilot champions for introductions to adjacent teams and accounts, and lean on the Quartr transcripts integration when pitching research teams that rely on earnings calls (Fira homepage, Quartr press release).
• First 100: Productize onboarding with standard connectors (Drive/OneDrive/SharePoint), scripts, and a playbook so it’s not founder‑dependent; hire 1–2 enterprise sellers for larger procurements, launch self‑serve for smaller firms, and prioritize SOC 2/DPAs to clear security reviews (Fira homepage).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

The investment‑research software market is estimated at about USD $4.1B in 2024, with adjacent financial‑analytics software adding a broader pool of roughly USD $9–12B (Verified Market Research, Fortune Business Insights).

Bottom-up calculation:

Illustratively, if there are ~150k–250k in‑scope analyst and reporting seats globally across sell‑side, buy‑side, wealth, and IB boutiques, and annual spend for this workflow is ~$15k–$25k per seat (mixing enterprise and SMB pricing), that implies ~$2.3B–$6.3B of global spend for Fira‑like software.

Assumptions:

• In‑scope roles include equity research analysts/associates, client‑reporting teams, and corporate‑finance/M&A analysts who need filings search, PDF→Excel, and auditable citations.
• Average annual price per in‑scope seat is ~$15k–$25k, reflecting enterprise software with data/connectivity and compliance controls.
• Seat counts aggregate buy‑side, sell‑side, wealth, and boutique IB globally; exact breakdown varies by firm size and region.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• AlphaSense: Enterprise research platform indexing broker research, filings, transcripts, and expert calls with AI‑generated summaries and cited results; overlaps heavily with Fira’s multi‑document, citable research workflow and is adding agent‑style features (AlphaSense).
• Sentieo (by AlphaSense): Equity‑analyst‑focused workspace with fast document search, a research notebook, table extraction, and an Excel plug‑in; closest workflow overlap with Fira on PDF→Excel and model integration (Sentieo).
• Bloomberg Terminal (Document Search & Analysis): Incumbent institutional package with vast proprietary data and AI document search integrated into the Terminal; competes on breadth, provenance, and integration at large institutions (Bloomberg).
• LSEG Workspace (Refinitiv Eikon): Enterprise research/data platform with advanced filings search, analytics, and Office add‑ins; targets similar analyst workflows and wins on dataset breadth and enterprise controls (LSEG Workspace).
• Visible Alpha (S&P Global): Provides broker models and granular consensus with Excel add‑ins/APIs so analysts can import audited estimates; overlaps with Fira on getting trusted numbers into spreadsheets (Visible Alpha).