About
The reading is the job. The gathering should not be.
Basis exists because analysts spend the majority of their time collecting information rather than forming views. We read the documents so the analyst can focus on the work that matters.
Why Basis exists.
The reading is the job. The gathering is the tax.
An analyst covering fifteen names is expected to read every 10-K, every quarterly report, every earnings call. That expectation is correct. What should not be manual is the collecting, the re-keying, and the reconciling that happen before any thinking begins.
Basis does the reading and the gathering. It ingests the filing, extracts every figure with a citation to the source line, and drafts the analysis. The analyst opens the document already read. The judgment is still theirs. Basis is a research tool, not investment advice.
Founded because the reading never scaled with the coverage.
Dana Whitfield spent nine years on the buy side, most recently covering industrials at a long/short fund. When coverage expanded from eight names to fifteen, the quarterly documents did not scale proportionally. The answer was working later. That was not a good answer.
Arun Varma spent the same years building document-understanding systems for regulated data. He held a clear view: a number without a source line is a rumor. The infrastructure to fix the problem already existed. It had not been applied to buy-side research workflows.
They founded Basis in 2022 in New York with the thesis that extraction quality is auditable when every figure links back to the exact line it came from. The first prototype was the teardown: paste an earnings snippet and watch every number surface with its citation.
Pre-seed funding let the team hire the research and engineering leads who define the accuracy standard and hold the product to it. The current focus is depth over breadth: fewer document classes, higher extraction quality, every figure sourced.
The people behind the readings.
A small team with backgrounds in buy-side analysis, machine learning, and financial data.
Dana Whitfield
Co-founder & CEO
Spent nine years on the buy side, most recently as a senior analyst covering industrials at a long/short fund. Left because the reading never scaled with the coverage.
Arun Varma
Co-founder & CTO
Machine-learning engineer who built document-understanding systems for regulated data. Believes a number without a citation is a rumor.
Priya Nair
Head of Research
Former equity research associate. Designs how Basis reconciles non-GAAP bridges and reports extraction quality.
Marcus Bell
Head of Product
Built research tooling for a data platform. Keeps the product sober and the tables legible.
Sofia Reyes
Founding Engineer
Works on the extraction pipeline and the citation graph that ties every figure to its source line.
How we think about the work.
Three principles that govern what Basis builds and what it will not do.
Every number sourced
A figure without a citation is a rumor. We would rather show our work than sound confident.
A tool, not an oracle
Basis does the reading and the gathering. The judgment stays with the analyst. We are not in the advice business.
Sober by design
No hype, no dark dashboards, no invented numbers. The product should feel like the best research on the desk.
In brief.
2022
Founded
New York
Headquarters
Pre-seed
Stage
5
Full-time
Basis Research, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware. Backed by pre-seed investors. No specific investor is named on this site.
We are hiring and open to early adopters.
If you run a research desk and want to shape how Basis reads, we want to talk. If you want to build it with us, see the open roles below.