Illiquid Markets’ Pain Points We Aim to Address
We target
sizable illiquid markets
The scope of illiquid markets goes beyond developing countries – it also includes Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME), State Owned Enterprises (SOE) and the public sector even in developing economies.
According to the IFC, just in developing countries more than 65 million firms have an unmet financing need of $5.7-8.0 trillion every year.
where investors are dealing with critical pain points, associated with the inherent problems of poor data availability, reliability, and inefficient processing of even available data into actionable information. These hurdles stem from deep-seated institutional constraints anchored in local socioeconomic and political realities.
When markets are illiquid and fundamental problems with data exist, the normal flow of asset prices, company filings and analyst coverage dries up.
Investors become blind
Mercer’s 2023 survey of more than 200 global asset managers (with over US $30 trillion assets under management):
- 77% of managers view non-transparent data as a significant barrier for investments in assets in Emerging and Frontier markets.
- ‘Accessible and relevant data’ is in the list of eight key drivers and goals in relation to unlocking greater levels of capital commitments across emerging markets.
by losing the transparent benchmarks taken for granted in developed markets. Determining true opportunity costs becomes guess-work, while finding intrinsic value of assets (as a substitute for transparent market prices) becomes hard to implement because the value is determined by non-market - even political - factors.
The consequences are severe. When investors ‘fly blind’, it leads to essential flaws in capital raising, capital allocation and value-based asset management. Underdeveloped, non-inclusive market institutions then spill over into equally non-inclusive political ones, creating knock-on risks for global security and sustainable growth beyond the borders of just developing countries.
‘Traditional approaches’ for estimating intrinsic value of assets in such environments – hiring specialized advisers, tapping private investor networks for insights or building in-house analytical teams – are slow, expensive and endlessly customised. With sparse public data, limited and costly access to fragmented non-public local insights, the economics rarely add up.
“As a former CEO of Naftogaz of Ukraine, the largest Ukrainian company, I witnessed situations when the analysis for major investment decisions was substandard. Even after months of hard work and multimillion dollar bills from leading international consultancies, it still had half the breadth and a tenth the depth that was common in liquid markets decades ago during my work as an investment banking associate in Merrill Lynch.”
Yuriy Vitrenko, Co-Founder
Low-cost general-purpose LLMs look tempting as an alternative solution but fall short: less rigorous reasoning for the nuanced realities of illiquid markets, model governance is absent, sources aren’t curated and scored adequately for reliability, and the vacuum of critical data and insights (that are not publicly available or not easily accessible) is promptly filled with AI hallucinations.
“The last two years of our AI adaptation to Ukraine-focused analytics proved that without domain experts curating sources and auditing reasoning path, general-purpose AI ‘breaks’ under the complexity of illiquid markets. Inadequate rigorousness, high inaccuracies, hallucinations, and insufficient consistency make ‘plug-and-play’ use of general-purpose LLMs is still inefficient for the investment analysis in illiquid markets. While we should expect rapid improvements in the general-purpose LLMs, it becomes increasingly evident that on illiquid markets there is a pressing need for the 'human-in-the-loop' approach - both for the experts’ insights and the model governance.”
Oleksandr Vedenieiev, Co-Founder
We aim to bridge the gap between traditional investment research and general-purpose AI by developing high-trust low-cost tools based on innovative AI-powered solutions.
Our tools, primarily using curated multi-agent systems now, become a viable choice for investors in illiquid markets:
- They serve as more time-efficient and less costly alternatives if compared to expensive ‘traditional tools’.
- They can be integrated with general-purpose LLMs, providing adequate domain depth with expert control over reasoning through vetted data management and a model governance layer.