Quartr Lands $18M to Build the AI Data Layer Wall Street Can't Ignore

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-11

When you're a startup trying to win over the world's biggest hedge funds, you need more than a good pitch. You need data that's impossible to find anywhere else. That's the bet Quartr has been making since 2020, and it just got a serious vote of confidence. The Stockholm-based company behind the leading first-party data layer for institutional finance and AI has closed an $18 million (€15.6 million) funding round. The money will accelerate product development and expand coverage of public company data globally. ### Who's backing this bet? The round was led by existing backer Altos Ventures, with new investor SEB also joining. With this investment, Altos becomes Quartr's largest shareholder. It's a significant milestone for a company that's been steadily building momentum: - In 2024, Quartr announced a $6.3 million (€5.4 million) investment from Altos Ventures - In 2022, it picked up an additional $2.9 million (€2.5 million), bringing its total Seed round to about $8.1 million (€7 million) That steady drip of funding suggests investors see something real here. And the numbers back it up. ### The growth story is hard to ignore Quartr says it continues to grow at triple-digit rates with strong unit economics, including net revenue retention of around 120%. In plain English, that means existing customers are spending more over time, not less. That's the kind of metric that makes investors lean in. Its customer base now spans some of the largest hedge funds, asset managers, and technology companies globally. We're talking about the people who manage billions and need answers fast. "What we want to enable is allow others to build on top of that [knowledge graph] to really know that you can get an exhaustive answer to a really complex query," co-founder and CEO Oscar Küntzel told Dillon Krasnigor of Altos Ventures in a video. That's the vision: not just a better research tool, but the foundation for an entirely new way of answering complex financial questions. ### What Quartr actually does Founded in 2020 by Küntzel, David Dag, Oliver Hamrin, and Sami Osman, Quartr calls itself the AI infrastructure for company research. It's built around structured, real-time investor relations (IR) data drawn directly from public companies. The company delivers through two core products: - **Quartr Pro**: An AI-powered research platform used by hedge funds, asset managers, equity researchers, and IR professionals. It lets you search across earnings calls, filings, and slide presentations, with every AI-generated answer linked back to its source document. - **Quartr API**: The data backbone for builders. It feeds structured audio, live transcripts, filings, and slide decks from more than 15,000 companies across over 65 markets into other platforms and AI systems. More than 800 financial institutions and technology companies use Quartr to research or build on top of its data. That includes four of the five largest hedge funds globally. When that many heavy hitters are paying attention, you know the product is solving a real problem. ### What's next for the fresh capital The company says the new money will go toward faster product development and continued expansion of its data coverage. It's working to extend its lead in an industry seen as a multi-billion-dollar market shifting rapidly toward AI. Quartr frames this raise as fuel for keeping pace with and staying ahead of that shift, not as a pivot into new lines of business. It's doubling down on what's already working. The long-term goal is to build the definitive first-party data layer that both human analysts and AI systems rely on for company research. That means drawing exclusively from public company IR material without training on customer queries. ### Why owning the source matters As demand for AI-ready financial data grows, Quartr is betting that owning the primary source, structured and delivered in real time, will keep it ahead of both traditional research tools and newer AI-native competitors. It's a simple but powerful idea: if you control the raw material, you control the quality of the output. And in a world where AI is only as good as the data it's trained on, that's a position worth fighting for. The funding round is a clear signal that investors believe Quartr is on the right track. With triple-digit growth, strong retention, and a customer list that reads like a who's who of global finance, the company is positioning itself as the go-to infrastructure for company research in the AI era.