54% of investors now use ChatGPT for trading and investment decisions, yet only 11% trust the results. This significant gap between AI's promise and its actual performance in financial markets represents billions in misallocated capital. TrueNorth has successfully raised $3 million in pre-seed funding to develop specialized intelligence designed to bridge this gap.
The pre-seed funding round was led by CyberFund, with participation from Delphi Labs, SNZ, GSR, and Ocular. This capital will be used to build what the TrueNorth team describes as "the reasoning layer for financial intelligence"—domain-specific AI that is engineered to avoid hallucinations when dealing with high-stakes financial decisions.
"Every vertical should have a specialized AI," says Willy Chuang, co-founder at TrueNorth. “Legal has Harvey. Healthcare has OpenEvidence. But finance, the highest-stakes domain, is still using models trained on Reddit threads and the open web. We're fixing that."
The Generic AI Problem: Fast Markets, Slow Models
Drawing on extensive experience from companies like Meta, Temasek, and Goldman Sachs, the TrueNorth team has firsthand knowledge of how generic AI models can hallucinate, fail to grasp market context, and lack the structural reasoning that professional traders employ to navigate market volatility.
"Generalized AI falls apart in financial environments,” says Willy Chuang, co-founder at TrueNorth. “Markets move too fast, the context is too deep, and mistakes are too costly. Domain-specific financial intelligence isn’t optional; it’s the future. And we’re the first to deliver it."
This critical insight has formed the core thesis of TrueNorth: financial AI must be specialized, operate in real-time, and be grounded in expert reasoning. The platform achieves this by converting elite trader expertise into AI agents through structured playbooks, real-time data fusion, and proprietary models specifically trained on market logic.
Early performance metrics validate this approach. Internal benchmarking indicates a 98% accuracy rate on finance-specific tasks, representing a 28% improvement over leading general AI models, while simultaneously reducing latency by 80%. Beta users have shown a 30-day retention rate of 33%, which is approximately double the industry average.
Expert Traders as Digital Twins
Professional traders dedicate significant hours each day to scanning markets, validating price levels, managing risk, and journaling their decisions—tasks that have traditionally been difficult to automate without substantial engineering expertise. Retail traders, conversely, face the challenge of lacking the necessary pattern recognition and strategic frameworks to trade consistently, even with available tools.
TrueNorth addresses both these challenges by transforming expert trading workflows into AI-powered digital twins. Through structured playbooks and agentic workflows, top traders can now encode their strategies using natural language. Simultaneously, everyday traders can operate with the logic and discipline demonstrated by the experts they follow. The startup has already established partnerships with leading financial educators who collectively represent over 1.5 million followers.
“Our platform is the first to model how professionals actually reason through markets. It abstracts complexity while preserving discipline,” explained Alex Lee, co-founder at TrueNorth. “Having agents identify trade setups and highlight risks in real-time, users can act with the logic of professionals without needing their decades of pattern recognition and institutional knowledge.”
40,000 Users Queued for Financial Intelligence
With significant backing from CyberFund, Delphi Labs, SNZ, GSR, and Ocular, as well as strategic angel investors including Bryan Pellegrino (LayerZero), WeeKee (Virtuals Protocol), and Jordi Alexander (Selini Capital), TrueNorth is launching its public beta to a waitlist exceeding 40,000 users.
"AI is transforming the way people interact with apps." says Konstantin Lomashuk, co-founder at Cyberfund. "Truenorth will redefine how people trade. With Truenorth people will trade better with AI-powered insights."
The company is collaborating with early adopters to co-develop the agentic workflows that are expected to define the future of AI-native investing. This future involves models that not only answer questions but also execute strategies, manage risk, and adapt to real-time market regime changes.
The public beta is set to open today.
About TrueNorth
TrueNorth is dedicated to building domain-specific AI infrastructure for the finance industry. Its platform translates the expertise of professional traders into adaptive intelligence that can be deployed by everyday investors. By combining structured reasoning, real-time data, and proprietary models, TrueNorth delivers financial insights that are accurate, context-aware, and ready for execution.