Prospero

Last Thursday, we gathered in SF for a candid fireside with Alvin Salehi, a 2x YC alum, Harvard Law grad, ex-White House tech advisor, and co-founder of Shef, the delivery marketplace for home-cooked meals.

It was an amazing evening alongside the Auth0 and Fidelity Private Shares teams. Great people, awesome conversation. Exactly the kind of room we love.

If you want a seat at the next one, registrations are still open for our upcoming events below.

• AI Champions dinner, April 29 (SF): In partnership with Bolt.new and MiniMax. If you’re spearheading AI usage at your company, this dinner is for you. Apply to join us here.

• Seed+ founders dinner, April 30 (SF): An intimate founder dinner, cohosted with Fidelity Private Shares. Invites are extremely limited; apply here.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Prospero AI aims to give retail and everyday investors the ability to understand stock signals like someone on Wall Street. The Prospero app combines hedge fund experience with 10,000+ AI models and 100,000,000+ data points to turn complex market data into clear signals, helping investors make more confident decisions. Prospero believes that real-time market intelligence, important datasets, and stock signals have either been gatekept within the finance industry or remain too complex for everyday investors to interpret. This is why it aims to demystify higher-level finance with insights into where hedge funds and institutions are putting their money, while breaking down the analysis and the why. Rather than just giving stock picks, Prospero focuses on educating users so they can make informed financial decisions.

Check it out: prospero.ai

Prospero’s app provides users with information around stock signals and analysis powered by AI, along with stock screeners and picks built on data typically less accessible to retail traders. The team is continuing to develop and add premium features within the app, such as notifications about changes to specific signals for given stocks. Prospero also has a newsletter with both a free and a premium tier.

• Crowdfunded $538 thousand in 2025 on Republic (previously covered by Unicorner) with more than 500 investors

• Grew from 10 thousand to 20 thousand users after its crowdfunding round, all with no marketing spend, and currently generating $100 thousand in ARR

• Has 12 thousand to 15 thousand active weekly newsletter readers

• Named Best AI Fintech Start Up USA 2025 by Global Financial Market Review

• Raised over $1 million in angel funding

If you’d like to explore opportunities with Prospero, let us know by replying directly to this email!

Prospero founder and CEO George Kailas started value investing when he was just 17 years old. In simple terms, that means looking for companies priced below what they’re worth, then profiting when the market eventually catches up. From an early age, he gained hands-on experience with investing, but felt there was a lack of clarity around how it worked. While big, notable finance blogs had stock picks, there wasn’t a thorough and beginner-friendly explanation for the everyday retail trader. This often led them to blindly follow picks without ever understanding why. 

Kailas continued to develop expertise, working as an analyst/investor at several companies. As someone who was both passionate and an expert, he wanted to provide similar access and explainability to everyday investors, which spurred him to start Prospero in 2018. Over time, a growing fascination with modeling and AI pushed the project further, eventually expanding into an app and a premium newsletter.

Historically, financial institutions have held a significant edge in both the data they access and the insights they act on that most retail traders simply don't have. Prospero aims to change this, with its app and ML-powered insights built to democratize financial insights. 

Per Prospero CEO George Kailas, while financial numbers are publicly available, they often can seem intimidating or gatekept, leading to a lack of understanding for retail investors. For instance, anybody can look at what Google’s price-to-earnings ratio is, but can they actually explain what a company’s P/E ratio means given its unique circumstances and how that informs their investment strategy? There are hundreds of numbers and ratios just like this one, and a lot of them can be noisy for people who are not working on Wall Street. 

That’s why Prospero tries to empower users through investing literacy in addition to providing stock picks through its AI models. The app aims to share and educate everyday investors on short- and long-term signals, giving them the tools to filter stocks and better understand what certain figures and information truly mean. Rather than just blindly following stock picks, this allows users to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions. 

Signals are designed to be easily interpreted but also technically rigorous. For example, “Market Similarity” is a long-term signal updated daily, reflecting how closely a given stock mirrors the performance of the S&P 500, while “Net Options Sentiment” is a short-term signal that indicates whether institutions are betting on a given stock to fall or rise and by how much in the shorter term. While users don’t need to know how these signals are calculated, the Prospero app helps retail investors build their own logic and analysis around each one.

Prospero’s newsletter is an extension of the app, with in-depth analysis and discussions about current market news and information. While plenty of news publications discuss finance, Prospero ‘s goal is to resonate with everyday investors through language for beginners, unlike other publications that skew toward those working in finance. 

Kairos told us he was thinking about the business in two phases. First is trust-building, and second is monetization. He sees Prospero as nearing the conclusion of the trust-building phase, primarily driven by its content, and this has focused on the development of an audience/community through channels like the newsletter and Discord. Beyond its educational content, many of its stock picks and breakdowns have served as a way of establishing trust, with its picks outperforming the S&P 500 by nearly 13x. 

Next is monetization. Prospero plans on adding more in-app features and new signals, focusing on an expansion into wealth management and launching its own ETF. Given that the team's resources and stock picks have established credibility with its community, it’s on the right track to monetize effectively.

While AI-enabled finance and investing content is also crowded, three strengths set Prospero apart. First, it knows exactly who it is serving (i.e., the retail investor). Everything else trickles down from that. Second, in a space with a lot of self-proclaimed experts, the company has an experienced and passionate leader who has been in the trenches as a real SME. Lastly, there is a strong community behind Prospero, seen through the app, newsletter, and Discord. If it can effectively grow its monetization while maintaining credibility among its target users, we can see Prospero being a go-to for investment education and selection.

• Official Prospero Newsletter [Prospero Substack]

• Prospero Crowdfund on Republic [Republic]

• 7 Best AI Investing Tools That Actually Beat the Market [Shares Prediction]

• Why Prospero is the Future of Stock Screeners [Prospero AI Blog]

• Retail investors are no longer following the market [Fast Company post written by George Kailas]

ICYMI: We recently announced our official investor syndicate. Check out the announcement post for more details on how to invest in our deals.