This AI platform is drastically changing how major financial firms do business: ‘Like having a really capable intern’

George Sivulka — the 27-year-old founder and CEO of the AI platform Hebbia — is supplying artificial intelligence to those with more information than time, and millions, if not billions, on the line.

Since starting the company in 2020, his client list has grown to include BlackRock, KKR, the U.S. Air Force, Centerview Partners, MetLife, Gunderson Dettmer, Oak Hill and Tower Grove, among others.

“The CEOs that get to the [top of these firms] know that innovation could either [elevate] their companies to even bigger levels or completely disrupt their market position,” Sivulka told NYNext. “And so, we’re partnering at the board level for massive transformational projects … really help[ing] them think through how they’re going to [embrace] change.”

While popular AI applications such as ChatGPT are largely transactional — a user issues a prompt, the model responds and then the conversation ends — Hebbia’s models are tailor-made, persistent, process-oriented and evolve through repeated use.

Agents — autonomous AI programs trained to mirror how a firm works — can execute customized workflows, asynchronously, non-stop.

An analyst at a private equity firm could instruct their agent to analyze a target company’s filings, build comps, generate a valuation model in Excel and prepare a draft investor memo — all within a single query loop. 

But the analyst isn’t being replaced, they’re being freed up from repetitive work so they can “focus on more interesting, investigative or curious tasks,” Sivulka told NYNext. “It’s almost like having a really capable intern.”

Sivulka initially planned to pursue a career in academia, not business.

He spent nearly a decade at Stanford, earning his undergraduate and master’s degrees before enrolling in a fully funded PhD program. Over the years, he saw innumerable peers leave for white-collar jobs and come back disillusioned.

They had secured high-paying, high-powered gigs, yet they spent their days copying data into slides or skimming dense filings for small insights.

“Some of the smartest people in the world were doing some of the stupidest tasks,” Sivulka said.

So he dropped out, moved into a closet in East Palo Alto, and started working on what would become Hebbia. Each morning he would wake up, code for 16 hours and cold-call prospective clients.

This was back before the world had heard of ChatGPT, when AI was still a murky and misunderstood term. Most investors didn’t bite at his ideas for intelligence tools, but eventually, a few did: Peter Thiel, Mike Volpe at Index, and later, Andreessen Horowitz growth partner Alex Immerman.

Sivulka ultimately decided to base Hebbia in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood to get away from the pervasive “groupthink” of the Bay Area.

He relishes being near to those he and his growing team are making tools for.

“We’re in New York [because] there’s nothing like actually being able to understand user pain, to be on the floor with our customers,” he said.

Just as Zoom made offices location-agnostic, Sivulka thinks AI will make companies compositionally agnostic. The new normal won’t just be in-person or remote, “You’ll have hybrid teams of AI agents and humans.”

He notes that in recent decades, despite software services and cloud platforms, productivity per employee hasn’t changed much. He believes AI has the power to finally move the needle, dramatically changing how companies work.

“AI is actually delivering hours and hours of time savings,” he said. “We’re seeing tangible results.”

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