Bridgewater’s top investors are backing an AI startup to give smaller hedge funds more firepower

Smaller hedge funds outgunned by deep-pocketed rivals believe artificial intelligence can help level the playing field — and former Bridgewater analyst Ian McInnis raised millions to do just that.

The startup, which is changing its name from WithAI to Multiplier, pulled in $6 million in new capital from existing investors such as Y Combinator and Bridgewater co-chief investment officers Greg Jensen and Karen Karniol-Tambour, as well as big names like Lux Capital, Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian, Fortress chairman Pete Briger, and Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jas Sekhon. Several of the firm's clients are also a part of the fundraise, according to a press release shared exclusively with Business Insider.

Multiplier is one of several startups founded by former hedge funders that hope to either automate or supercharge parts of the investment process. CEO Ian McInnis, a Princeton grad who just turned 27 years old, worked at Bridgewater under Jensen on large language model projects.

The firm currently counts six long-short equity funds as clients, as Multiplier specifically focuses on fundamental stockpickers' investment processes and builds its product within its clients' own clouds, to prevent potential leakage of funds' secret sauce.

"You still need domain specialization, but you also need firm specialization," McInnis said in the release.

"Now that the AI's getting woven so deeply into your firm, your security demands go way beyond compliance box-ticking. Investors are legitimately concerned about their edge being stolen."

The startup's goal is to build AI agents that can "research every stock on Earth, every day, watching for setups or updating projections," according to the firm's website. With more mundane parts of the job now outsourced to AI, the theory is that investing teams can spend more time on the parts of the job where human intuition can lead to outperformance.

The backing from Bridgewater's leaders — and McInnis's former bosses — is notable given the investment giant's push into artificial intelligence. The manager has partnered with Mira Murati's Thinking Labs to create an LLM that can sift through text with "expert-level taste and judgment" and runs a fund that is primarily run by AI and machine learning algorithms.

Additionally, Jensen has personally invested in OpenAI and Anthropic.