When Bountiful Financial approached Aion Labs in early 2025, they represented a $2 trillion market trapped in "spreadsheet prison." The entire faith-based investing industry operated on 1980s technology trying to serve 21st-century clients. Multiple bottleneck's surrounded creating a single personalized investment framework, which required 4-6 weeks of manual work. When S&P Dow Jones Indices expressed interest in partnering to create faith-based indices, the spreadsheet approach hit a wall. SPDJI needed real-time updates, API delivery, institutional documentation, and reproducible methodology. None of this was possible with manual processes. The mandate: Build an operational AI platform that could ingest doctrine, understand nuanced values, and produce investment-grade data products at scale. In 9 weeks.

Running on 2000s technology, clients demanded modern solutions. The fundamental challenge was teaching a computer to understand 175 years of religious doctrine and translate it into investment decisions with expert-level nuance. Aion Labs built a document processing pipeline that ingested religious texts and fine-tuned a large language model specifically on LDS doctrine, creating a system that understood subtleties instantly—zero tolerance for tobacco, distinctions between alcohol production and retail, differences between medicinal and recreational cannabis, and no restrictions on caffeine despite common misconceptions. This intelligence sat atop an institutional-grade database of 11,000+ securities with granular revenue analysis, moving beyond simple yes/no flags to answer complex questions like whether a company derived more than 5% of revenue from restricted activities.

The result transformed what previously took 4-6 weeks of consultant work into a 2.3-second automated process. Users could input their values with specific importance levels, and the system would instantly map these to 32 investment criteria, apply appropriate thresholds, generate scores across six doctrinal standards, and explain every decision with full traceability back to source teachings. A real-time analysis layer could then evaluate all 11,000 securities against any personalized framework in under five seconds, turning portfolio analysis from a one-time consulting engagement into a continuous service. Aion Labs hadn't just built a product—they had constructed the infrastructure enabling new indices, model portfolios, and thematic strategies to be created in hours instead of months, essentially founding an entirely new category of values-aligned financial services.

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