hello@itrexgroup.com +1 559 550 4575

←←All cases

Enhancing Emerge9’s investment ecosystem with QA and design expertise

Client

Emerge9, a US-based forward-thinking startup focused on alternative asset management and financial consulting solutions

Industry

FinTech, Private equity

Services

UI/UX design, Quality assurance

Tech stack

Jira, GitLab, Postman, Midjourney, Figma, Rive

Challenge

Emerge9 is a San Francisco-based startup that offers a next-generation alternative asset platform. This solution gives investors access to private-equity continuation funds and GP-led co-investment opportunities alongside top sponsors. Since its launch, Emerge9 has facilitated access to billions in private-equity deals. Emerge9 is looking to further revolutionize the alternative asset and financial consulting landscape with Gen AI-driven solutions. The company set out to refine its existing Emerge9 private equity platform while also creating Bullpen.ai, a new AI-powered financial analyst solution designed to support financial consultants and fund managers with faster, more accurate report generation and editing. With two ambitious products under development, the client needed a reliable partner to support their vision. They brought in ITRex to provide specialized design and QA expertise, helping to translate Emerge9’s product concepts into usable, reliable applications without compromising the client’s pace of innovation.

Our team’s contribution

Emerge9 partnered with us to bring reliability and design excellence to their ambitious project. Our responsibility was to:

●

Perform comprehensive manual quality assurance and testing for all new features on both web applications—Emerge9 and Bullpen.ai

●

Design new features for Emerge9 and design the new Bullpen.ai application from scratch based on agreed user flows and business logic

●

Provide expert recommendations to improve user experience across both platforms

●

Collaborate closely with the client's development team in a dynamic, fast-paced environment to adapt to new requirements without compromising existing functionality

Solution

We deployed a dedicated team of a QA engineer and UI/UX designers who integrated directly with the client's workflow, providing continuous support and validation throughout the development cycle. We worked on both platforms:

●

Emerge9, an alternative asset platform—a marketplace where deal managers, financial consultants, and investors can connect to negotiate private equity investments and manage syndicate deals.

●

Bullpen.ai, an AI-powered financial assistant that streamlines workflows for financial services teams. It can analyze complex financial data and market trends, and it allows consultants to generate and edit financial reports.

This project is ongoing, so our team is still working on some of these tasks. Quality assurance Throughout the project, our QA worked closely with the client to identify bugs, flag usability issues, and sometimes provide recommendations before implementation. Our specialist performed manual testing in the areas of functional, end-to-end, and compatibility testing. Key activities included: Testing Emerge9 alternative asset platform features, such as:

●

GP-led deal creation. This functionality allows deal managers to post offerings and invite investors to participate. Since the process involves completing many fields, the platform introduces an AI-powered document parser that simplifies data entry. Deal managers can upload PDF documents, and the system automatically extracts information to populate the fields.

●

Investor registration and approval workflows

●

Secure communication between deal managers and investors

●

Syndicate functionality, enabling participating organizations to create branded equity offerings

Testing Bullpen.ai, with a focus on:

●

AI-enabled financial report generation from existing templates

●

AI-powered report editor capabilities for adjusting the overall tone, translating, and regenerating reports

●

Performance testing of multiple large language models (ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others) integrated via API

●

Web search and deep search features for sourcing data, plus integration of external company reports

●

Role-based authorization and collaborative report editing

Design support Our designer improved the Emerge9 platform user interface and designed Bullpen.ai from the ground up. ITRex’s contributions included:

●

Strategic design partnership. We participated in a weekly sync with developers to align on features requiring design for the upcoming sprint, ensuring design kept pace with development.

●

Core feature design. We designed the entire user interface for Bullpen's key features, including the financial report builder and editor, the multi-LLM AI assistant interface, and the data source management section. For Emerge9, ITRex created key functionality, such as an investment fee calculator, a custom campaign management tool, and a podcast page.

●

Adapting to evolution. As business logic evolved, our team redesigned existing components and incorporated new flows.

●

Stakeholder alignment. We created high-fidelity interactive prototypes and static mockups to demonstrate new features to the internal team and prepared polished presentation decks to help secure buy-in from potential investors.

What’s next Our partnership with Emerge9 is active and ongoing. Our future work includes:

●

Preparing and conducting thorough user acceptance testing demonstrations with actual financial consultants to gather critical feedback for product refinement

●

Participating in a partial app redesign to adapt how users edit and interact with documents, further enhancing the AI-assisted core of the Bullpen application

●

Continuing to provide QA and design support as new features are rolled out and the platform scales

Impact

●

Enhanced product reliability. Our team helped the client identify and resolve issues early, preventing bugs from reaching end-users and ensuring a stable user experience across complex financial workflows.

●

Seamless platform evolution. We made sure that frequent changes in requirements and business logic are smoothly integrated without disrupting existing features, allowing the client to innovate rapidly while keeping the platforms stable.

●

Superior user experience. We designed an intuitive, powerful interface for Bullpen that simplifies complex tasks, reducing cognitive load for financial consultants.

●

Informed development. Our team gave actionable feedback to guide development toward a more usable and robust feature implementation.