My Big Idea: investment banking AI startup Grasp

‍Hi Richard! What's your elevator pitch? 

Grasp is a Swedish AI startup automating investment banking and management consulting workflows. We have developed a multi-agent AI system capable of executing complex tasks the way human consultants do, delivering ready-to-present spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations tailored for investment banks, management consultants, and private equity firms.

What does the market need it?

The global investment banking and management consulting market represents $1.4 trillion in annual spending, yet the work remains almost entirely human-driven - typically performed by teams of junior employees whose tasks are 90% manual and repetitive. As AI systems automate large portions of this work and dramatically increase productivity by enabling firms to do more with fewer resources, platforms like Grasp are positioned to capture a significant share of this spend.

Where is the business today? 

In October 2025, we raised a $7M Series A from investors including Octopus Ventures and Yanno Capital to support our expansion - most notably hiring across product and sales and scaling our London office to serve our growing international client base. As part of this expansion, we hired former PitchBook director Lukas Otto as our UK Managing Director. Over the past 12 months, we’ve achieved 4x ARR growth and now serve more than 200 customers across 30 countries, including all Big Four consulting firms.

What made you think there was money in this?

Before founding Grasp, I worked at McKinsey as a consultant alongside my co-founder Johan Devér. We knew firsthand how manual and repetitive much of consulting and finance work is - from late nights digging through reports to early mornings building slide decks. The processes and pain points were obvious to us.

In 2020, we began experimenting with AI together with our friend and third co-founder, former Ericsson AI engineer Simon Hällqvist. By combining our industry experience with Simon’s technical expertise, we developed an AI system capable of executing complex tasks such as M&A origination and due diligence - producing results that exceeded what a team of four consultants could deliver.

What's your biggest strength?

When I worked at McKinsey, almost no one talked about AI. This was before ChatGPT and before the technology entered the mainstream, but even so, there was little thought given to automating the repetitive, manual workflows that defined the job. It was widely accepted as simply “part of being a management consultant.”

Recognising early on how transformative AI would become gave us a significant head start - both over incumbent tech players and over the large consulting firms, which didn’t seriously consider large-scale automation until much later. Having worked inside McKinsey and understanding the workflows firsthand, we know the problems and pain points deeply - so we also know the solutions that are needed.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Hiring the best people is what ultimately determines whether we succeed or fail. A business like ours only works if we consistently convince exceptional individuals to leave very safe, very lucrative careers to bet on our mission. That means investing disproportionate time and care into hiring, and then enabling our team to do their best work by giving them the capital, autonomy, and freedom they need to build.

We also have a clear view of how our product - and AI more broadly - is reshaping the industry. When we started, maybe 5% of consultants were genuinely curious and proactive about AI; now it’s at least 50%, and will likely reach 90% within a few years. Firms will soon track AI usage explicitly, feeding it into performance reviews and promotion decisions. In many cases, not using AI as a finance professional will become a liability - and will even lead to being let go.

For us, the opportunity is to align our product with these shifting incentives. If the people who adopt AI fastest advance the fastest, then Grasp becomes more than a tool - it becomes a career accelerator.

How do you market the company?

I focus on revenue by building strong customer relationships and driving brand awareness. I spend a lot of time meeting customers in person to understand their pain points and challenges - these conversations are far more valuable than calls, as they build trust and surface insights you can’t get otherwise.

I also work to firmly associate Grasp with AI in high finance. Events and speaking engagements are an important part of this, especially given the number of major sector meetups where we can position ourselves as the leader in AI for finance. Education plays a key role as well: we run webinars on best-practice AI use cases in finance to help the industry understand how modern research should be done.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

In October 2025, we raised $7M from Octopus Ventures and Yanno Capital. Combined with our strong traction, this gives us the funding we need to scale Grasp significantly in the coming years. Talent is just as important as capital for long-term success, and we’re using this round to build best-in-class teams in both London and Stockholm.

Tell us about the business model

We are currently focused on the advisory segment, including investment banks, management consultants, and private equity firms. Commercially, we use a traditional SaaS model with annual subscriptions. Long term, this model will likely evolve. Because the value of Grasp’s output is largely known - since we generate the same analyses human teams produce today, such as PowerPoint decks for M&A work - a consumption-based model may ultimately be more logical than a fixed annual subscription.

What were you doing before?‍

I was a management consultant at McKinsey in Stockholm, alongside my co-founder Johan. Our third co-founder, Simon, worked with AI at Ericsson. Together, we combined the technical expertise and real-world industry experience needed to build solutions that address the workload challenges in the consulting industry.

What is the future vision?

Looking 10 years ahead, companies will still make the major strategic decisions - such as company acquisitions - but the way they arrive at those decisions will be completely different. Today, a team of four to six people might spend weeks producing a 100-page PowerPoint deck filled with market, company, and competitive analysis. In the future, those insights will be generated automatically in minutes at the push of a button. Because of this shift, dedicated research organisations that primarily gather market information will largely disappear, as it will be too costly to employ thousands of people to do work that AI can complete in a minute.

More broadly, AI will drive down the cost of financial transactions dramatically. Importantly, this doesn’t have to be negative for our customers. As prices fall, the number of transactions is likely to increase, meaning the overall market size will grow even if the price per project decreases - consistent with Jevons’ paradox. This will open up high-quality decision support to everyday businesses, not just large corporations. Even smaller companies making expansion decisions will be able to base them on robust data and insights they can access themselves, rather than relying on instinct or paying for expensive advisory services.