Halluminate Raises $30M to Build Finance AI Training Labs

Halluminate, a nine-person San Francisco startup building reinforcement-learning environments and benchmarks for AI agents in investment-banking and private-equity work, has closed a $30 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, Fortune reported. The round brings total funding to $38.5 million for the company, founded in 2024 by Cornell computer-science alumni Jerry Wu and Wyatt Marshall.

CEO Wu told Fortune that "four of the top five closed-source U.S. AI labs are paying customers" and that the team has "crossed the mid-eight figures in annualized revenue run rate" while running profitable.

Halluminate sells what Wu calls "verticalized data research labs": managed sandbox environments where agents train, proprietary benchmarks that score financial-task performance, and expert evaluation services. Its Westworld Finance Diligence Bench puts models through 88 tasks drawn from anonymized real private-equity transactions; the highest average score across the seven models tested was 51%.

Matt Streisfeld, a general partner at Oak HC/FT, framed the bet in one line: "When the agent starts getting into long horizon work, testing work and specialization will really be key." Y Combinator, Orange Collective, Heavybit, and FT Partners joined the round, with angels from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.

The deal lands inside a dense funding tape, one of 427 AI funding alerts we've tracked over the last 90 days; the mid-eight-figure ARR disclosure, with profitability, is the less common detail.