Brightwave

Brightwave was an investment research company. Founded in 2023 by Mike Conover, who co-created Databricks' Dolly, and Brandon Kotara, formerly CTO of LedgerX, Brightwave raised $21m from Decibel, Point72 Ventures and OMERS Ventures to build AI research agents for investment professionals. In the first half of 2026 it shipped quickly: thirteen client surfaces, Office agents, desktop and mobile apps.

The public evidence now points to a pivot. The website describes "an agent infrastructure company", the research application's login redirects to that homepage, Brandon Kotara is listed as Founder and CEO, and the company's open-source Tidebreak release of 25 September 2026 was described as its last. No product posts have appeared since June. We did not locate any company announcement of a pivot, wind-down or change of leadership.

We lower the rating to Niche/Watch, at 5.05, and keep the outlook Under Evaluation. This Rating Review applies the full sub-criteria standard used for every company covered since October to the research platform as last documented, and replaces the 6.21 Emerging rating; our 20 October coverage update had already moved the outlook from Softening to Under Evaluation. Under that standard, claims without method do not lift a score and controls not located score low. The largest moves are in Commercial Value, now 4.58, where the trial and pricing can no longer be confirmed on the company site, and in Enterprise Readiness, now 3.36, where vendor viability and support are now the main questions. We located no company statement or other material news since that update. Existing users should confirm support, data export and deletion commitments before renewing.

Strengths

• Technical founders. Mike Conover co-created Databricks' Dolly and led machine-learning teams at LinkedIn and Workday; Brandon Kotara was CTO of the regulated exchange LedgerX.
• Shipping pace in 2026. Twenty-five product releases between January and June 2026, including thirteen client surfaces, Office agents and desktop apps.
• Security engineering. Detailed public write-ups on sandboxed agent computers, credential-swapping egress proxies and prompt-injection defences.
• Model flexibility. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google with automatic failover and user selection.
• Citations. Sentence-level attribution with bounding boxes on the source passage.

Cautions

• Product continuity. The website now describes an agent infrastructure company and the research application's login redirects to the homepage.
• Leadership. Brandon Kotara is listed as Founder and CEO; Mike Conover, chief executive through 2025, is no longer listed.
• Funding. No financing has been located since the $15m Series A in October 2024.
• Data retention. Users should confirm how long their documents are retained and how deletion is evidenced; the DPA keeps data as long as necessary.
• Enterprise evidence. Only "SOC 2 compliant" language was located; SSO, deployment options and information-barrier controls were not.
• Content. Quartr is the only licensed data partner named.