Frequently asked questions

Medusa gives lean investment teams the intelligence of top-tier hedge funds. It ingests the data your firm already has (Excel, broker files, risk systems, market data feeds, legacy scripts), reconciles it into one consistent data layer, and runs AI agents on top:

• Investment risk: watches your book and your limits, and answers exposure, factor, and stress-test questions in plain language, grounded in your own numbers. It also reads news and filings to flag the thematic bets your factor model can't see.
• In the room: sits in your investment committee, answers out loud on your book, and logs what you decide.
• Portfolio construction (in progress): suggests daily rebalancing that keeps exposures on budget; it advises, you decide.
• Across the firm: gives CIO, compliance, IR and client teams the same view of the portfolio the investment team has; client reports, investor Q&A and RFP answers are built on that view for your firm.
• Custom agents: cover the workflows specific to your firm, built alongside your team.

You keep your existing systems. Medusa runs on top of them.

Boutique hedge funds, new launches, independent asset managers, and family offices. Large firms surround the desk with risk, reporting, and quant teams. Medusa delivers the same institutional-grade answers without the headcount or the enterprise price tag. If your middle office runs on a web of spreadsheets and a few key people, you are who we built this for.

No. Medusa gives a lean team the risk, reporting and quant research capability of a large firm, without the headcount or the enterprise price tag. It works alongside the people you have: your analysts stay in the loop on every answer, and if you have an ops or reporting person, they get a team under them, not a replacement.

No. Medusa is provider-agnostic and built on your stack. It works on top of Bloomberg, MSCI, Axioma, Enfusion, or whatever you already run, and it uses your existing subscriptions rather than replacing them. No migration, no migration project.

No. Medusa deploys into your environment (your cloud or on-premises) and builds around the systems and files you already run. Your data is not migrated onto a vendor's data model: the reconciled data layer is built inside your deployment, from your own sources, and it stays yours. The onboarding work is ours, not your team's; the pilot ingests your data where it lives. And there is no new interface to learn: you ask questions in plain language, and briefings arrive in your inbox.

Dashboards show you the book. Medusa watches it for you: it checks your limits on a schedule and alerts the team by email or in the channels your team already uses when one enters warning or breach. Conversational AI on top of a single vendor's data is quickly becoming standard, and that is good for everyone. A chat window waits for a question. Medusa stays with your team: the same Medusa answers on the desk, on your phone, and in Teams, Slack or Bloomberg chat, sits in your investment committee by voice, and logs what you decide, with the reasons and the figures at the time. The deeper difference is structural. Incumbent tools each answer from their own silo, so risk, reporting, and the portfolio system can still give you three different numbers for the same question. Medusa's agents all read from one reconciled data layer built across your sources, including the platforms you already run, so the answers agree. And because the platform is AI-native, it is priced for lean investment teams rather than enterprise budgets, and it works across whichever vendors you already use instead of locking you into one.

Because those workflows need the firm's own data, and that is where most AI stalls.

Mercer's 2026 survey of 131 asset managers measured the share of firms with AI already integrated, workflow by workflow:

• Workflows on external data: 49% in idea generation, 40% in processing external data sets.
• Workflows on the firm's own book: 16% in client reporting, 15% in risk management, 13% in portfolio construction.

The same survey names the reason: 69% of firms cite data quality or access as the main barrier.

AI adoption stops where your internal data begins.

Research tools work on external data, so they ship anywhere. Risk, reporting, and portfolio construction cannot answer until positions, exposures, and conventions from every source are assembled into one reliable picture of your book. Medusa builds that foundation first, which is why its agents work in exactly the workflows where generic AI stalls.

In your environment. Medusa deploys in your cloud (Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud) or on-premises, in your choice of EU, US, or Switzerland regions. We come to your data; your data does not come to us. The model runs where you choose: a leading model through your own Azure or AWS private endpoint, or an open-weight model so nothing leaves your network. Every number an agent produces traces back to the exact file, report, or feed it came from, so any answer can be audited. More on security and data ownership →

No. Medusa uses commercial AI models under agreements that exclude client data from model training, and your data stays inside your deployment.

Medusa is model-agnostic by design. Today the agents run on a leading commercial model under agreements that exclude your data from training, inside your own deployment. Our edge is fitting agents to your book and the way your team sees it, not the underlying model, so when a better model ships we can swap it in without rebuilding, and you are never locked to one AI lab. You choose the route: a leading model through your own Azure or AWS private endpoint, or an open-weight model running in your environment, so nothing leaves your network. Open-weight models are tested on our risk agent, and we test them on your own questions when you ask.

Not a position file. Your book is your firm's own classifications, risk-model mix, mappings, overrides and conventions, spread across the systems you already use: prime broker and administrator files, your risk engine, your portfolio system, your spreadsheets, your notes. Medusa makes that usable by AI without replacing any of those systems, so the answers come back in your team's definitions, not a vendor's.

Yes, completely. Every conversation is recorded end to end: the question asked, the answer given, and every data query the agent ran in between. Each number in an answer carries a citation to its source, so any answer can be replayed and verified after the fact. When an investor or a regulator asks how a number was produced, you can show them, step by step. Nothing the agents do is a black box.

Yes. Your administrator sets up groups, and members share analyses with each other: a colleague opens one with every number and its source, and can continue it. Every share and withdrawal is recorded, the record shows who asked each question, and sharing can be switched off for a whole deployment.

Two loops. First, your feedback: every answer can be rated directly in the interface, and that feedback guides how we tune the agents for your workflows. Second, evaluation suites: every agent ships with a fixed set of graded cases, and a model upgrade or a prompt change has to pass them before it reaches you. You get the pace of AI improvement without the regression risk.

Today: investment risk (conversational risk, factor exposures, stress testing, the thematic bets your factor model can't see, and monitoring of your limits with scheduled alerts); the same view of the book for the CIO, compliance, IR and client teams; and Medusa in your investment committee, answering out loud and logging decisions. You can watch the film at medusaip.ai/room and try the risk agent at medusaip.ai/demo. In development: portfolio construction, as an add-on. Every agent reads one view of your book, built from your files and systems when we onboard you.

Yes. Medusa sits in the meeting: it listens, answers on your own definitions when it is addressed, and shows the written answer and its sources on the room's screen. When the committee says "log it", the decision is written up and confirmed with a click, and every exchange is on the record. Outside the meeting, the same Medusa joins your team in Teams, Slack or Bloomberg chat. Watch the three-minute film, or try it yourself in the live demo.

Some firms should. A large fund with a ten-person engineering bench can build and maintain its own stack. For everyone else, the honest answer is scope. Reading Excel files is the easy 20 percent. The hard 80 percent is bringing your sources into one reconciled view, entity resolution, the tooling that keeps AI answers exact, and maintaining all of it as formats and feeds change. Internal builds of this kind tend to decay within months of the person who built them moving on. Medusa exists so a lean team gets the outcome without staffing the discipline.

Both. Most firms choose between software that doesn't fit their process and a custom build that's slow and depends on one developer. Medusa is a product underneath: the same platform every client runs, maintained, upgraded and tested on every change by us. On top, it's fitted to you: your definitions, your sources, and tools built around your process, in your own environment. Custom work is priced separately and declines as it becomes standard.

Three steps. First, a live demo and a first look at your workflows, with no preparation needed on your side. Second, a paid pilot: about six weeks, on your own data, with a defined deliverable. Pilots deliver a working system, not a prototype. Third, production: a platform subscription plus custom agents built alongside your team. If you would rather start smaller, begin with a free review of your risk process (next question).

Yes. Start with a free review of your risk process. On one call, the person who builds your risk pack walks us through it on screen; nothing needs to leave your systems. You get one page back: what a large firm's risk desk would see, and what can be automated. There is no commitment, and if a pilot makes sense, that page becomes its scope.

Book a free review →

Yes. Request access to the live demo and you get your own login to the agent on Saltmarsh Capital, our fictional multi-strategy fund, built on real market data. Colleagues from your firm can join you in a group to share and continue each other’s analyses. We review each request individually and email you when your account is ready. It runs on demo data only, so nothing from your firm is needed.

Try the live demo →

Medusa is one product in two tiers, priced per firm: everyone on the team uses it. Medusa covers the investment team's book: it watches it, alerts on your limits, answers questions, and runs stress tests and what-ifs. Medusa Firm-wide adds the same view of the portfolio for the CIO, compliance, IR and client teams (in progress). Portfolio construction will be an add-on. We scope pricing on a call after the demo, against your book, your sources and the workflows you want covered; it is a fraction of the $100K to $500K+ a year enterprise risk platforms typically charge. The pilot is paid, and its fee is credited toward the first quarter's platform fee on conversion. Custom forward-deployed work is priced as a separate retainer that declines as it standardizes into the platform, so our incentives sit with delivering value, not with keeping bespoke work perpetual.

The label fits part of it. Medusa is a platform that gives lean investment teams the intelligence of top-tier hedge funds: it automates the workflows that surround the investment desk, investment risk, client reporting, and the reconciled data layer both stand on. We describe it from the investment seat because that is where the value lands. The desk gets its answers in seconds, and the operations burden stops consuming investment time.