Fundamental Research Labs (FRL), the applied AI research company behind Shortcut, today announced that Brett Caughran has joined the company as Chief Growth Officer. Caughran will help to build the frontier AI stack for fundamental investors, spanning Shortcut, the leading AI agent for Excel; Sho, a long-running digital analyst; and Signals, qualitative signal development for fundamental investors. He will also lead a new Forward Deployed Investor team that embeds with client firms and leads institutional adoption of The Digital Investor across the buyside.

Caughran spent 13 years as a fundamental analyst and portfolio manager at Maverick Capital, D.E. Shaw, Citadel and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors before founding Fundamental Edge in 2022. Fundamental Edge has trained more than 2,000 buyside professionals across its programs for hedge funds and asset managers and has become a leading voice on applying AI agents to the fundamental investment process. At FRL, Caughran’s mandate spans product and growth: defining what each layer of the stack must know and how it must work to meet a professional investor’s standard, building the team that deploys it inside client firms, and serving as the bridge between FRL’s research organization and the investment professionals who will rely on its work.

“In the last 18 months, we witnessed AI going from unable to do real Excel work to performing at the level of a top tier analyst,” said Dr. Robert Yang, CEO and co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs. “In the next 18 months, we will have agents that think and act like an investor. They will know how to frame a thesis, what to check, when to be skeptical, and how a given firm wants the work done. Brett is uniquely positioned to help us make this happen. He not only spent his career as a professional investor, but Brett has also been systematizing the investment process at scale. At Fundamental Edge, he taught many students this process, and now he’ll help us teach the AI so they can further empower investors.”

“It is clear we have crossed a threshold in Investing AI. For the first time, the underlying primitives are powerful enough to construct a true end-to-end digital analyst that can execute desktop investment research the way a good human analyst would,” said Caughran. “One of the most critical of those building blocks is an agent that can work in Excel, the workbench of the fundamental investor. Robert and the FRL team have built the fastest, most capable and most cost-effective Excel agent in the market, and it is receiving accelerating adoption in the fundamental investing community as a result. Building The Digital Investor on that foundation, working seamlessly in Excel and grounded in an institutional-grade research process, is the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m thrilled to do it with this team.”

The three-layer AI stack for fundamental investors

The Digital Investor is FRL’s AI stack for fundamental investors. Each layer builds on the one below it, and all three share one execution engine and one methodology library:

  • Layer 1. Shortcut: the leading AI agent for Excel. The execution layer. Shortcut builds, updates and audits financial models from natural-language instructions and source documents. Every model the stack produces is formula-driven, traceable, and editable in Excel.

  • Layer 2. Sho: a long-running digital analyst. The analyst layer. Sho works a coverage list the way an analyst does: monitoring names, separating signal from noise, deciding which analyses to run, and using Shortcut and a deep library of investment skills to produce models, earnings work and written research, with human approval for consequential work.

  • Layer 3. Signals: qualitative signal development built for fundamental investors. The signal layer. Signals applies sector-trained models to the qualitative evidence investors already use, such as common set-up patterns, management tells, and concepts like business quality improvement vs. deterioration, and converts it into dated, auditable signals that Sho and human analysts can then diligence and deploy.

Firms will be able to configure the stack to their own process, house style, sector focus and holding periods. The stack is enabled by a firm’s internal research, models and data within the firm’s own environment and permissions. Each client’s information stays with that client: it is not shared across firms and is not used to train FRL’s models, and every output carries a full audit trail back to its sources so compliance and investment teams can see exactly what the system did and why.

Exclusive strategic partnership with Fundamental Edge

Under the partnership, Fundamental Edge’s research methodology, including its frameworks for business analysis, key drivers, modeling, earnings and valuation, will be built into every layer of the stack on an exclusive basis, then configured client by client. Fundamental Edge continues to operate independently under Caughran’s ownership, and all live cohort programs, including Analyst Academy, Credit Academy, Modeling Academy, and PM Academy continue uninterrupted, supported by a broad and experienced instructor team.

About Fundamental Research Labs

Fundamental Research Labs is an applied AI research company building autonomous, collaborative agents. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Dr. Robert Yang, a computational neuroscientist and former MIT faculty member. FRL has raised more than $40 million from investors including Prosus Ventures, a16z Speedrun, First Spark Ventures, Patron and Patrick Collison. Its first commercial product, Shortcut, launched publicly in July 2025, holds the first verified state-of-the-art result on SpreadsheetBench and is widely used by finance professionals. Learn more at fundamentalresearchlabs.com and shortcut.ai.

About Brett Caughran

Brett Caughran is Chief Growth Officer of Fundamental Research Labs and founder of Fundamental Edge. Over 13 years on the buyside he was a fundamental analyst and portfolio manager at Maverick Capital, D.E. Shaw, Citadel and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors. He has taught applied value investing as an adjunct professor at Arizona State University, teaches in Wharton Executive Education, and co-hosts the Invest with AI podcast.

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