Goldman Sachs has led a $15 million investment round in Kensho, a startup that is seeking to supplant human equity analysts with intelligent big data mining bots. Built by a team of veteran software engineers with backgrounds at giants including Google and Apple, the Cambridge MA.-based firm is billed as a financial services equivalent of the virtual intelligent assistants being built by the world's biggest tech firms - such as Apple's Siri, IBM's Watson and Google's Now. Kensho currently answers a million distinct types of natural language questions about the impact of global events on asset prices. Users type in a market related question, such as: What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle East?

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