Carousel Technologies vs Hermes Robotics

About

Carousel Technologies was a spreadsheet automation platform that used AI to help financial analysts, consultants, and operations professionals build Excel models and transform data — providing Carousel Chat for multi-tab financial model creation from natural language descriptions, and Quick Fix for automated data formatting, cleaning, and restructuring. Founded in 2023 and a Y Combinator graduate, Carousel raised $500,000 in seed funding before being acquired by AlphaSense in October 2025.\n\nCarousel's tools targeted the substantial time financial analysts and strategy consultants spend on mechanical Excel work — building financial models from scratch, reformatting data received from external sources, and creating pivot tables and charts. The AI layer allowed users to describe in natural language what they wanted built ("build a 3-statement financial model with assumptions on one tab and outputs on another") and receive a working Excel structure, reducing hours of setup work to minutes. The data transformation tools handled the frustrating task of reformatting inconsistently structured data into clean, analysis-ready formats.\n\nAlphaSense's acquisition in October 2025 reflects the market intelligence platform's strategy to add AI-powered workflow automation to its financial research offering — AlphaSense provides AI-powered research and market intelligence for financial professionals, and Carousel's Excel automation capabilities complement the research workflow by enabling analysts to take AlphaSense's insights and rapidly build financial models around them. The combined capability positions AlphaSense as a more comprehensive financial analysis platform. In 2025, the financial AI tools market has seen significant consolidation as larger platforms acquire specialized AI workflow tools to build comprehensive analyst suites rather than point solutions.