No hedge fund employee works harder than Eve.
Eve oversees dozens of brainiac office hands; monitors countless earning calls; keeps tabs on CEOs; parses corporate filings; conducts due diligence; brainstorms stock picks.
Eve never stops. Never dillydallies. Never moans about a bonus.
Eve, as you’ve probably guessed, is an AI bot — and the linchpin player at Epicenter Capital, a fledgling three-person fund that’s backed by the Laffont brothers, the billionaire co-founders of Coatue Management, according to people familiar with the matter.
Epicenter and Eve are part of an experiment by Rahul Kishore, who struck out on his own after a successful eight-year run at Coatue, a technology-focused hedge fund with AI ambitions of its own.
Just about everyone on Wall Street is trying to leverage artificial intelligence. But San Francisco-based Epicenter is an attempt to replicate — and eventually surpass — industry legends of old with a new, human-lite fund powered by AI, where the technology isn’t a tool, but a teammate.
With Eve at their side, Kishore and his two colleagues hope to outdo other funds that employ hundreds of people. Their fiendishly elusive goal: to invest in 10 companies that generate a 10-times return in 10 years, the people said.
In addition to Philippe Laffont — who rarely ever backs spin-outs — and Thomas Laffont, Kishore’s backers include Jaimin Rangwalla, Coatue’s chief investment officer for public investments, and former Coatue trader Daniel Senft.
Kishore, Rangwalla and the Laffont brothers declined to comment. Senft didn’t reply to messages seeking comment.
New AI World
If Kishore is right, Epicenter offers a glimpse at a future in which AI might replace big teams of analysts. Other funds already use in-house AI chatbots to help portfolio managers parse data and brainstorm. But Eve is plugged into every part of the business, from each email to every trade. It’s always working and doesn’t need a prompt from people to take action.
Eve is certainly busier than the humans at Epicenter, which only makes long bets. It builds dozens of bots and teams of AI agents, writes code for them and assigns them tasks. Eve also scours the disclosures of more than 13,000 companies; listens to podcasts; scrutinizes social media posts; summarizes the news; and, each morning, generates a podcast for Kishore to listen to while he drives to work.
“Eve allows us to consume 10x more information in 10x less time. It helps us identify new potential investment ideas and accelerates our research,” Kishore wrote in an investor letter seen by Bloomberg. Eve’s “repository of memories allows us to better evaluate company performance as well as our investment process.”
When Eve receives feedback, it recodes its own programming, learning like a junior analyst — only faster.
Already, Eve has surprised Kishore and his other fellow humans, Chief Financial Officer Ivan Ting and analyst Jackson Dibble, by accomplishing tasks that only six months ago they thought impossible.
For instance, Eve trawled through a jumble of information buried in a mishmash of different corporate documents to get a handle on a company rolling out a new product. The job might have taken a human analyst a week. Eve did it overnight.
‘Origin of Waves’
Epicenter only opened to outside investors in July, and it’s unclear how much money it raised.
What is clear is that Kishore and Eve are looking for the same things many other investors want: companies that are unappreciated today but will astound people in the future. Think Apple Inc. circa 2000.
Epicenters “are the origin of waves that ripple outward, influencing and reshaping everything around them,” Kishore, 35, wrote in a LinkedIn post last year to explain how he came up with the name for his firm. “Our portfolio is highly concentrated in the companies we believe will define the next decade, initially in the public markets.”
At Epicenter, AI is even keeping tabs on the cost of AI. Its ClaudeCode suggested — on its own — that the firm could save money by moving its servers to CloudFlare from Amazon Web Services. The cost of compute dropped 90%.
And as long as Eve works, it looks like a bargain. Hedge funds can pay human analysts hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hard-working Eve costs mere thousands — and never complains.
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: Discover something new! Click here to register for our upcoming webcasts.
Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit
bloomberg.com.
Read more articles by Hema Parmar
