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2025 CNBC Disruptor 50: AlphaSense volts to #8 on the list with launch of deep AI market research

Wall Street isn’t immune from the plot line that has generative AI resulting in wholesale knowledge worker replacement. A new tool from AlphaSense, called Deep Research, won’t provide any comfort.

The generative AI agent functions like a team of analysts operating at what AlphaSense calls “superhuman speed,” generating research and market insights, and building investment-grade briefings.

But Jack Kokko, AlphaSense CEO and a former Morgan Stanley analyst and Wharton School MBA, isn’t worried about the job outlook for Wall Street professionals.

“It’s a popular narrative,” Kokko told CNBC of the job replacement fears during an interview on “The Exchange” on Tuesday after AlphaSense ranked No. 8 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. “But I would not be so sure,” he said.

More coverage of the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50

What Deep Research does is tap into the AlphaSense universe of more than 500 million business and financial documents, which includes filings, press releases, content about public and private companies, and expert insights based on call transcripts. Last year, the company spent nearly $1 billion to buy Tegus and its library of a quarter-million business-focused interviews.

“There are a hundred on a single company, and no human can read it all, but Deep Research will read it all and ask questions,” Kokko said.

It will answer questions too, ones that Wall Street analysts are often paid to field, within minutes.

The company, which dates back to 2011 and has had Goldman Sachs Growth Asset Management as an investor since its origin, already offers rapid summaries of equity research and real-time customizable reports. And it already has a tool called Generative Search designed to think like an analyst, ask natural language questions and receive precise insights sourced from AlphaSense’s content, which covers 37 languages.

Any of of its enterprise intelligence customers in equities research, corporate development and finance, on or off Wall Street, will be able to plug their internal document libraries into Deep Research, which will then be able to take both pro and con positions, and offer internal and external perspectives, in a report generated in record time.

“It would have taken a human analyst days or weeks,” Kokko said. “I was an analyst,” he added.

Timothy A. Clary | Afp | Getty Images

The company says it counts majority of the S&P 100 as clients. That client base grew by about 25% in 2024, to more than 5,000, including Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Pfizer and JPMorgan.

For companies making investments that run into the millions or billions of dollars, being able to make these decisions on the back of all of this information is a revelation, Kokko said, citing the experience of a private equity firm that told AlphaSense that Deep Research did the same or even better on a report the AI ran than its in-house analysts could do in weeks.

There are plenty of reasons to believe that this is all bad news for knowledge professionals like finance bros. And more CEOs are starting to talk that way, from Shopify’s CEO who recently said no job hire requisitions will be approved unless a manager can prove that the job can’t be done by AI, to fellow Disruptor Anthropic‘s CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said AI would wipe out up to half of entry-level office jobs and whose latest Claude model can work 7 hours straight without a break or burnout.

Everyone is getting an AI assistant today — on Tuesday, it was Starbucks’ baristas.

Wall Street’s long embrace of AI has only accelerated in the wake of OpenAI’s arrival in 2022. Last August, JPMorgan Chase rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to employees that can help them with tasks like writing emails and reports, while Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. In January, Goldman Sachs gave its bankers, traders and asset managers access to a generative AI assistant, the first stage in the evolution of a program that will eventually take on the traits of a seasoned Goldman employee, Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti told CNBC.

But Kokko says the Wall Street bonus — for now, and as he sees it, into the future — is safe. He is still of the belief that the latest AI will enhance the jobs of Wall Street analysts rather than threaten them. “What it does is make human analysts and business people so much more productive,” he said. “That person will be operating with a higher ROI [return on investment] and companies don’t cut high ROI people,” he added.

What AI job doomsday soothsayers are dismissing too easily today is “the top line expansion that comes from being able to do things in a much more agile way,” Kokko said.

“It’s 10x prior productivity when it is you and the machine,” he added.

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Quantum computing startup IQM raises $320 million as investors pile into the tech

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Quantum computing startup IQM raises 0 million as investors pile into the tech

Quantum computing firm IQM says it’s raised $320 million of fresh funding to ramp up investments in technology and commercial growth.

The startup, which is headquartered in Espoo, Finland, was founded in 2018 by a team of scientists with the aim of building powerful quantum computers in Europe like the machines companies such as Google and IBM are building in the U.S.

Quantum computers are machines that use the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers, which store information in bits (ones and zeroes). Quantum computers use quantum bits, or “qubits,” which can be zero, one or something in between — the aim being to process much larger volumes of data to facilitate breakthroughs in areas like medicine, science and finance.

IQM’s funding round was led by Ten Eleven Ventures, a U.S. cybersecurity-focused investment firm, while Finnish venture capital firm Tesi also invested. It gives the seven-year-old company “unicorn” status, meaning it’s valued at $1 billion or more, according to co-CEO and co-founder Jan Goetz.

The investment underscores heightened investor buzz around the quantum computing space. Shares of publicly-listed quantum firms like IonQ and D-Wave Quantum have seen huge rallies in the past year. IonQ stock is up nearly 480% in the last 12 months, while D-Wave Quantum’s shares have spiked over 1,400%.

“If you compare us directly to the companies which are Nasdaq-listed and take KPIs like people, revenue, patents, things like this, actually we are not behind. We can actually compete on this level,” Goetz told CNBC in an interview.

Goetz said that IQM has come a long way since the early days of building the company. The company has 350 employees globally and has built out finance and sales operations as well as a factory in Espoo where it builds its machines.

Europe vs. the U.S.

There are now a number of European companies working on quantum computers, including IQM, Pasqual and Quandela. However, they are yet to achieve the scale of their U.S. counterparts.

In a speech earlier this year, the European Commission’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen said that European quantum computing startups often struggle to scale due to a lack of private capital, noting that the European Union receives only 5% of global private funding compared to 50% for the U.S.

“If you just look at what is happening in Europe in these deep tech fields which come out of universities, naturally we have quite a lot of startups because we have so many good universities in Europe. But then it’s really hard to make them grow,” IQM’s Goetz said.

“Now I think there is a risk of, if you have very high valuations in companies in the U.S., that they just drive M&A consolidation using their high share price.” Indeed, IonQ in June announced it would buy U.K. quantum computing startup Oxford Ionics for nearly $1.1 billion in a deal consisting primarily of stock.

IQM has now sold a total of 15 quantum computers to date. The company sells two main products: its flagship machine, Radiance, and a more affordable quantum computer called Spark, which the company sells to universities.

Going forward, IQM is planning to move beyond just hardware. Goetz said the firm will use part of the cash it’s raised to develop a software platform aimed at making quantum computing accessible to developers who aren’t experts in the field.

The other main goal for IQM is global expansion, with plans to scale up commercial and sales operations in the U.S. and Asia. Goetz said IQM has sold two systems in Asia so far — one in Taiwan and the other in South Korea — and recently sold its first machine in the U.S.

While an initial public offering may be an option for IQM further down the line, Goetz insisted the company has no IPO plans for the moment, adding there are still “attractive routes” in the private markets for raising capital.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to “build a sustainable, profitable business and really make it a kind of company that’s there to stay and to shape the future of compute over a long time.”

“We will do whatever is necessary to make that happen,” Goetz added.

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Sen. Rand Paul blasts Trump’s stake in Intel as ‘a step towards socialism’

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Sen. Rand Paul blasts Trump's stake in Intel as 'a step towards socialism'

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., does a TV interview in the Russell Senate Office Building on Tuesday, June 3, 2025.

Bill Clark | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s decision to take a 10% stake in embattled chipmaker Intel, calling the investment “a step towards socialism.”

Intel announced last month that the U.S. government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, purchasing 433.3 million shares at a price of $20.47 per share, giving it a 10% stake in the company. Intel noted that the price the government paid was a discount to the current market price.

Rand said government ownership is “a bad idea.”

“It’s always a mistake to say, ‘Well we have this one bad policy, all right, we’ll tolerate a little socialism, but we don’t want anymore,” Paul told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

President Donald Trump said on Truth Social last month that the government’s stake in the chipmaker is a “great Deal for America, and, also, a great Deal for INTEL.”

Trump has taken an increasingly heavy hand in the private sector, raising concern among conservative lawmakers like Paul, who have long opposed big government. In August, the Trump administration said the government would take 15% of certain Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices chip sales to China. The Pentagon bought a $400 million equity stake in rare-earth miner MP Materials. It also took a “golden share” in U.S. Steel as part of a deal to allow Nippon Steel to buy the U.S. industrial giant.

Among the most vocal supporters in Congress of Trump’s Intel proposal has been Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist from Vermont. Sanders, a longtime and vocal Trump critic, told news outlets last month that, “Taxpayers should not be providing billions of dollars in corporate welfare to large, profitable corporations like Intel without getting anything in return.”

But Rand said it’s not smart to involve the government in the free market.

“I worry that the free market movement, the movement that was a big part of the Republican Party, is being diminished over time,” Rand said.

WATCH: Sen. Rand Paul on U.S. government’s stake in Intel: It’s a step towards socialism

Sen. Rand Paul on U.S. government's stake in Intel: It's a step towards socialism

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Translation startup DeepL launches an AI ‘agent’ in challenge to players like OpenAI

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Translation startup DeepL launches an AI 'agent' in challenge to players like OpenAI

DeepL CEO Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski.

DeepL

German startup DeepL on Wednesday said it was expanding beyond artificial intelligence-powered translation into general AI agents focused on businesses.

The term “agent” refers to an AI tool that can carry out tasks in the background in response to user prompts.

DeepL Agent is designed to complete “repetitive, time-intensive tasks across a wide variety of functions” according to the company. It can responds to natural langauge commands from a users. DeepL Agent can be used in various teams from human resources to marketing, the company added.

Agents or agentic AI have become buzzwords in the technology industry, underscoring how companies see how these digital assistants automating more mundane tasks. Companies such as Microsoft with Co-Pilot and Anthropic’s Claude are products focused on the enterprise customer.

The move is a step beyond what DeepL, which is valued at $2 billion, has focused on since it was founded in 2017. It potentially pits the company against major AI players like Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft, which are targeting enterprise customers.

DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told CNBC on Wednesday that the company’s agent was a natural extension of its translation product.

DeepL launches AI agent that goes beyond translation

“We found out that the technology is as capable of helping you whenever you’re doing research or whatever you’re doing,” Kutylowski said.

“All of those tedious tasks in your office when you have to switch between different systems and take some data from one system, put it into another one, AI, and those autonomous agents, and the DeepL Agent in particular, can help solve so much better.”

DeepL’s translation product is based on its self-developed large language models. Kutylowski said DeepL Agent is based on its own models, as well as on those available “externally” from other providers.

While there are a large number of companies advertising AI agents, the market is still in a very early stage. Overall investor interest in AI companies is meanwhile still high. Amazon-backed Anthropic on Tuesday announced a funding round that put the firm at a $183-billion post-money valuation.

Technology listings appear to be gathering steam, with both fintech firm Klarna and crypto exchange Gemini this week unveiling details of their upcoming initial public offerings.

Against this backdrop, CNBC asked Kutylowski if DeepL was considering an IPO, to which he responded: “That’s not a short term plan that we would be considering right now.”

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