Stockholm-based AI startup Grasp has raised $7 million in Series A funding, led by Octopus Ventures with participation from Yanno Capital, to support its international growth and product development. Founded in 2020 by former McKinsey consultants Richard Karlsson and Johan Devér, and former Ericsson AI engineer Simon Hällqvist, the company builds multi-agent AI systems designed to automate analytical and presentation work in investment banking and management consulting. Grasp’s technology connects domain-specific AI agents to industry datasets and tools, enabling faster and more consistent financial analysis. The company will use the funding to expand operations—starting with a new London office—and to strengthen its engineering and sales teams.
Grasp’s proprietary multi-agent system transforms currently complex, expensive, and time-consuming tasks performed manually by finance professionals. The platform connects highly domain-specific AI systems to trusted tools and datasets, helping teams produce higher-quality output by uncovering more relevant companies, surfacing deeper insights, and reducing time spent on manual, repetitive tasks.
Grasp was founded by former McKinsey consultants Richard Karlsson and Johan Devér, together with former Ericsson AI engineer Simon Hällqvist. Having experienced firsthand the manual, repetitive nature of finance work, the trio intimately understands the processes and pain points faced by professionals in the field. Combining their deep industry insights and technical expertise, Richard, Johan, and Simon developed a multi-agent AI system capable of executing complex tasks exactly as humans would – delivering ready-to-present spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations tailored for investment banks, management consultants, and private equity firms.
“At McKinsey, we spent over 90% of our time on manual work – reading reports, building excel models, creating presentations,” said Richard Karlsson, CEO and co-founder of Grasp. “Together with Simon, who brought critical AI expertise from Ericsson, we realised AI had the potential to completely transform this $1.4 trillion market of human-intensive finance work. Five years later, we’re proving this thesis. While AI initially boomed in text-centric fields like law, recent advances have finally enabled AI agents to tackle complex, multimodal tasks prevalent in finance. Now, with Octopus Ventures joining our journey, we’re excited to continue expanding our rapidly growing customer base.”
The global investment banking and management consulting services market represents $1.4 trillion in annual spending. As AI systems advance and automate large parts of this work, and provide a massive uplift in productivity by enabling firms to do more work with fewer resources, AI systems like Grasp are set to capture a significant share of this spend.
“Grasp is at the forefront of vertical AI in finance, having built a multi-agent system that delivers the kind of high-quality output finance professionals rely on,” said Rich Bolton, Principal at Octopus Ventures. “Their strong traction – more than tripling annually and winning major global customers – demonstrates both the power of their technology and the urgency of the need. We’re thrilled to support a team with such deep domain expertise and a clear vision for transforming how financial work gets done.”
Yanno Capital, an investor in Grasp since May 2024, also participates in the round:
“We continue to have a strong conviction in the mission of Grasp, to automate 90% of the knowledge work done by financial analysts, and we are thrilled to continue to back the strong founder team”, says Anna Storåkers, Partner at Yanno Capital.
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Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/grasp-raises-7m-series-a/
