AlphaSense acquires Y Combinator-backed Carousel, an AI assistant for Excel (www.businessinsider.com)

AlphaSense has acquired Carousel, a Y Combinator–backed startup that builds an AI assistant for generating financial spreadsheets and models in Microsoft Excel. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. AlphaSense — which says it just surpassed $500 million in ARR, serves 6,500 corporate clients, and is valued at about $4 billion — will fold Carousel’s team into its product organization to build AI-powered spreadsheet generation tools. Carousel, founded in 2023 and part of YC Winter 2024, was created to automate the repetitive steps analysts face when constructing models. Technically, Carousel’s assistant focuses on extracting data from PDFs and presentations, formatting models, generating formulas, and explaining complex logic via a conversational interface, turning document search and data pulls into ready-to-run Excel models. For AlphaSense, which recently acquired Tegus and has been leaning into financial-services workflows, the integration promises to automate large parts of junior- and mid-level analysts’ work, enabling faster scenario testing and higher throughput. The deal underscores a broader generative-AI trend: tooling that augments domain specialists’ productivity (rather than replacing them) and shifts how analysis is produced and scaled in finance.