Amazon is not a retailer. It is also a cloud computing provider, a logistics operator, an advertising network, a media company, and a hardware manufacturer. The way most financial markets classify it, as a single entry in Consumer Discretionary ,captures none of that.

The GICS and ICB classification systems that underpin how portfolios are built, indices are constructed, and risk is measured were designed in a different era of corporate structure, and they have not materially changed since.

Theia Insights, a Cambridge-based deeptech company, has spent four years building an alternative, and has raised $8 million in a Series A to accelerate it.

The round was led by MiddleGame Ventures, with participation from Further Ventures and Unusual Ventures, which led Theia's previous round. Total funding now stands at $14.5 million.

The company was founded in 2022 by Dr Ye Tian, a former PhD research scientist at Amazon Alexa with an academic background in NLP and AI, who assembled a team drawing on backgrounds from Nasdaq, Morgan Stanley, Meta, UC Berkeley's economics department, and the University of Cambridge's computer science department.

Theia's core technology ingests regulatory filings, earnings transcripts, press releases, and financial data from public companies, applying proprietary NLP and quantitative modelling to extract business activities and map them into what the company calls a dynamic, self-learning ontology of the global economy.

Unlike static classification systems, it models companies as multidimensional entities, tracking “who does what by how much” across all of a company's revenue lines as those lines shift over time.

The resulting map feeds four products: a Dynamic Industry Classification system (TIIC), a Concept2Universe tool (C2U) that translates investment themes into evidence-backed company universes, a Thematic Factor Model (TFM) for identifying structural trend drivers behind stock price movements, and Theme Watch Indices (TWI) for tracking global industry themes in real time.

The company's current customers are institutional: leading index providers, major banks, large asset managers, and hedge funds. The strategic rationale for the new capital is an expansion into private markets, where no comparable dynamic classification system currently exists, a gap that becomes increasingly significant as more institutional capital allocates to unlisted assets.

The round also funds engineering and research depth and commercial scaling.

Patrick Pinschmidt, co-managing partner of MiddleGame Ventures, framed the problem as both structural and timely: “Financial markets still rely on static classification systems that have changed very little over the past several decades. Theia's approach builds a dynamic, AI-driven map of a company, sector, or investment theme, providing game-changing tools for investors and AI systems to reason from.”

The AI angle is deliberate: as financial institutions build their own AI workflows for research, portfolio construction, and capital allocation, they need structured economic data that machines can reason with, not only that analysts can read. Theia is positioning its ontology as infrastructure for both.