Financial AI Agent 'Terminal X' Sees 40x Growth as DG Daiwa Ventures Backs Series A
Tokyo-based venture capital firm DG Daiwa Ventures (DGDV) has participated in a Series A investment for Project Pluto, a New York-based startup developing an advanced artificial intelligence agent tailored specifically for institutional investors.
Project Pluto is the creator of "Terminal X," an AI Financial Agent designed to help asset managers, private equity firms, and investment banks navigate the massive amounts of unstructured data that dominate the financial industry.
While financial institutions sit on a goldmine of data—including real-time market feeds, broker research, internal models, and endless email chains—much of it remains fragmented and difficult for traditional AI models to process. Project Pluto tackles this "unstructured data" bottleneck by rebuilding data infrastructure from the ground up, making it optimized for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Terminal X operates by massively indexing both public and private data, allowing investors to search and reason down to the specific cell and numerical level. Rather than acting as a simple search bar, the AI is designed to mimic the thought processes of actual analysts and portfolio managers, integrating tasks like drafting investment memos, analyzing comparable companies, and preparing for investment committees into a single automated workflow.
Since its launch in early 2025, Terminal X has demonstrated explosive enterprise traction. According to the company, usage among enterprise clients surged roughly 40-fold over an eight-month period, processing over one million queries. Notably, the startup has achieved a high conversion rate from paid proof-of-concepts (PoC) to full contracts, with growth driven primarily by word-of-mouth among clients rather than aggressive external marketing.
"We have been paying close attention to Project Pluto’s ability to deeply integrate into the actual business workflows of institutional investors," DGDV said in a statement regarding the investment. The VC firm stated it intends to actively support Project Pluto as it attempts to establish a new global standard for AI-driven financial decision-making.
Project Pluto was founded in August 2022 and is led by CEO Hyun Hong. DGDV, a joint venture between Digital Garage and Daiwa Securities Group, focuses on seed and early-stage startups with the goal of bridging the gap between Japanese and global tech ecosystems.
Norbert Gehrke
