CFV November Newsletter
Quick Updates
Here’s what’s happening:
- CFV announces first external investment
- Venture135 recap and QCF Class 11 Demo Day pitches
- Portfolio company updates
Our Investment in Apteo
Last month we announced our latest investment into Apteo, a New York-based data discovery and analytics platform designed for the capital markets. Shanif, Manan, and Moeez founded the company to address some of the issues they dealt with in their former roles, and the team previously graduated from Plug and Play and ERA. The team’s long-term plan is to expand beyond the capital markets space by providing a data science platform that anybody can use.
The problems that the Apteo team are tackling revolve around how people work with data to make decisions. When building out their product, the Apteo team found four specific areas to focus their efforts on.
- Discovering what data is available within the organization (do we have an existing subscription to this?) and from credible external sources (is it publicly available open data, and does it even exist?).
- Organizing data that is available and accessible, as data comes from many sources and comes in various formats. It’s an entirely manual process to clean potentially useful data and then making sure that the right teams have access to it.
- Validating that the organized data is relevant to the analysis. After going through days or weeks of discovering and organizing data, teams will often either send it off to their data science teams (lucky if they exist within the org) or will have to outsource the process which can take weeks and tens of thousands of dollars.
- Analyzing the data. If, and only if all three steps before analysis take place, then the data can finally be put into use. The biggest pain point here is that it’s very hard to get to this state.
Apteo’s OneData platform helps companies catalog their internal and external data, identify datasets that are relevant to their workflows, and forecast key metrics using machine learning. OneData is able to do this by starting with over 2 million publicly available datasets to showcase the power of the platform to any user without needing to connect to their data lakes. This includes everything from cleaning, to organizing, to tagging, and even suggests data that you should be considering.
We are really excited to continue to work with the Apteo team as they continue to scale up. If you’re interested in checking out the platform, you can sign up for a free account here!
Venture135 Recap
On November 21–22, our team hosted our annual venture conference at Barings. The two-day event sold out and was highlighted by notable keynote speakers, panelists, and over 30 pitching fintech companies.
The event also acted as the Demo Day for the nine companies in Class 11 of the Queen City Fintech accelerator. Each of these companies made huge strides since beginning the program in early September, and we are looking forward to seeing what the future holds for each of them!
The Demo Day pitch videos can be found below, and please reach out to Clay if you would like an intro to any of these founding teams.
BoxMagic — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
CARL — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
CORL — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
exSEED — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
FactSquared — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
Froogal — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
KiteEdge — Queen City Fintech Class 11 Demo Day
