Empor.top: The stories of top companies

The Story That Went Missing

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations - Yuval Noah Harari

Every long-term investor wants to hear the story.

Every company wants to tell the story.

And yet—somewhere between the founder's first spark and the analyst's final model—the story gets lost.

The company makes PowerPoints.

The investor gets spreadsheets.

Across the canyon between them, the important things—intent, texture, culture, the "why now"—tend to fall.

If you've ever tried to compress a dense tangle of filings, calls, interviews, and rumor into a clear narrative you can actually use, you know the grind. It's the kind of work that's supposed to be electrifying but too often becomes a chore.

↑ Back to Top

The Builder

I studied Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Then came Google — working on Payments, Search, and Maps, shipping user-facing products at global scale, guiding teams through the thousand paper cuts of performance and polish. I conceived and launched my own product there: Google OneToday. That meant learning how to pitch to Sergey Brin and Marissa Mayer, how to work with branding, legal, and multiple other teams to make something real happen. Then came the first startup: Bewgle, an AI/NLP venture dedicated to extracting insight from unstructured text for brands and retailers. I raised capital, built proprietary models, and eventually exited to a data-observability company, where the work became an even deeper dive into signal-from-noise: anomaly detection, rule recommendations, LLM-powered insight engines, agentic workflows. The through-line wasn't just AI; it was translation—turning messy input into useful output for real people under real constraints.

The spark for empor.top came from an unexpected place: Acquired.fm, a podcast that does deep, engaging dives into company histories. The storytelling was brilliant—cinematic, thorough, the kind of thing that makes you actually understand a business. But there was a problem: they only produce one episode a month. Manual research at that depth doesn't scale.

I found myself investigating companies constantly and kept wishing for "an Acquired.fm for the company I'm looking at right now." That same feeling kept surfacing. A story—context with contour.

↑ Back to Top

The Build

After building something for my own use, I showed it to a few folks. I came to know from them that the rhythms of fundamental research haven't changed much in decades. You still meet analysts who carry around patched-together notebooks of PDFs and screenshots, who keep mental scrapbooks of CEO quotes and footnotes, who triangulate truth from half a dozen sources. They're brilliant, but they're also tired. Tired of the swivel-chair work across databases and dashboards. Tired of the sense that the more you read, the less you see.

But AI has changed everything. AI's ability to structure, synthesize, and curate at speed, paired with a human editorial sense—that could work. That could collapse days of initial research into under an hour.

I decided to make the story the product.

Great products often begin as insistences. Empor.top insisted that the narrative itself could be the interface to research. Not an afterthought. Not a "TL;DR." The product.

Instead of beginning with tables and toggles, Empor.top begins with a scene: a founder's decision, a market's hinge moment, a regulatory turn, a supplier's quiet leverage. It's not fiction; it's a felt sequence of facts organized to answer the only question that truly matters to long-term investors: What is this company, really?

On the surface, it looks like a digital magazine—company deep dives, founder profiles, sector essays. Under the hood, it's a choreography of AI agents doing a number of key tasks - data ingestion, retrieval, multi-pass summarization, style control, proofreading, and narrative calibration.

Another AI agent adds emotions and pauses to the story to make it ready for converting it to a podcast. The AI generated podcast episodes extend the experience to commutes and gym sessions—because sometimes a story told well matters more than a story read quickly.

Adding a new story now is entirely automated.

↑ Back to Top

The Signal

Within roughly a quarter, Empor.top crossed 35,000 visits on 20,000 unique users, driven entirely by word of mouth and social shares. The catalog exceeded 1,200 company profiles and narratives—a long tail of global coverage.

The reaction from portfolio managers and analysts became formulaic:

• First: "This is actually fun to read."
• Then: "I got what I needed to decide whether to spend more time."
• And finally: "Send me five more like this."

On social platforms, Empor.top's stories circulated with gratitude. Early readers also included portfolio managers and analysts at recognizable firms in London and New York—people who need to get smart quickly on companies the whole world isn't already debating. Venture investors used it to get founder-centric views of companies that don't have a decade of public filings. Others—operators, founders, industry folks—read it because it's simply a joy to encounter a company explained with respect for the craft of building it.

The early signal from everyone was clear and consistent: Empor.top compresses the time of initial research from days to under an hour. That one sentence became the spine of the whole product.

↑ Back to Top

empor.top In Practice - A Sample Scenario

Imagine a Tuesday in the life of an analyst at a mid-size London fund. Your PM asks you to ramp quickly on an Indian renewables company you've never followed closely. There's news—a new offtake agreement, component constraints, regulatory tweaks. You have four hours.

You open Empor.top and read the company narrative. In twenty minutes you've got a mental map: founding arc, edge, early missteps, recent turns, supplier dependencies, the subtle risks buried in success. You drop the two most relevant paragraphs into your notes, follow three links to primary documents, and sketch three questions for the next call. You aren't done—but you're ready. Your model makes sense because your story does.

Or you're a venture partner in NYC, looking at a founder-led logistics software company. You spin up an On-Demand brief with internal memo excerpts. By end of day you have a private narrative and a 6-minute audio summary that captures the founder's superpower and the bottleneck you'll test in diligence.

Or you're simply a curious human on a Sunday afternoon. You read a profile of a quiet Japanese industrial that keeps showing up as a linchpin supplier in three different categories. Somewhere between the paragraphs you remember why you liked business in the first place.

↑ Back to Top

It's Still Day One

There are about 55,000 listed companies in the world. About 5,500 are valued over $1B or more. Over 1,500 startups are unicorns - venture backed companies valued at $1B or more. Like waves in the ocean, this entire space is constantly churning and evolving.

Empor.top is really a bridge. On one side are the people who build companies, who know too much and too little at the same time. On the other are the people who allocate capital, who have to decide before the world has decided. In the middle is the story—the only thing that can hold that much complexity without dropping the meaning on the floor.

Empor.top tells business stories the way they're meant to be told—engaging, detailed, and holistic.

In words, sound, or visuals. Magazine, podcast, or video—whichever way you like a company to come alive. A story you could read on the flight to a partner meeting and feel prepared. A story you could hand to a junior analyst and say, "Start here."

It's the missing step before you open the spreadsheet—the bridge between curiosity and conviction. It's how investors discover their next great idea. It's how research becomes inspiring again.

↑ Back to Top

Talk to us

• X @emportop
• Shantanu Shah - Founder
• Email