LLMs hallucinate on 300‑page 10‑Ks — API that reads and cites filings

Many financial analysts, sell‑side researchers, auditors and compliance teams wrestle with 300‑page 10‑Ks and other complex filings, and find that LLMs regularly hallucinate or misquote these documents, creating legal, financial and reputational risk. This problem affects roughly 300,000 financial and research professionals who subscribe to terminals, data feeds and research tools — a market we estimate at $18.0B assuming about $60K ACV per team. You could build an API‑first platform that ingests EDGAR and corporate filings, canonicalizes and chunk‑parses text and exhibits, and returns model outputs that include deterministic citations (file, page, section, paragraph, exhibit and byte offsets), verifiable source snippets, confidence scores and a hashable provenance trail. Layer RAG with token‑efficient summarization, OCR for scanned exhibits, structured schema extraction (financial tables, risk factors, MD&A) and developer SDKs so teams can embed citation‑backed answers into terminals, compliance workflows and analyst tooling. The main technical and commercial challenges are achieving high‑precision parsing across inconsistent filing formats, keeping ingestion current for thousands of filings per day, and designing a cost structure that supports enterprise SLAs while targeting ~$60K ACV customers. Market timing is favorable: widescale LLM adoption and RAG integrations are creating demand for verifiable sources, product teams prefer composable APIs, and regulators and auditors increasingly expect provenance for model outputs. To stand out, prioritize filing‑specific extraction accuracy, end‑to‑end legal‑grade provenance (hashable artifacts and auditable logs), developer ergonomics and predictable pricing; competitors offer search, annotations or vector primitives, but few combine filing‑grade parsing, deterministic citations and API‑first composability — execution risk and unit economics will determine whether this can scale.