Our investment in RavenPack, the big data platform used by 70% of the world’s leading hedge funds
The financial services industry relies just as much on tech as tech companies themselves. A third of Goldman Sachs’ workforce are developers, making them a bigger employer of engineers than Facebook. While much technology is built in-house, now and then you meet an exciting company which has managed to build a product which outperforms internal solutions and which significantly alter the way investors work.
Big data has become a catch all phrase. But one of the unintended consequence of its proliferation is that everyone is capturing everything; banks, hedge funds and asset managers have become data hoarders and increasingly difficult to create value out of the data as they drown in unstructured data. Yet markets are also uncertain and emotionally driven, acquiring and finding patterns in that data is key if investors want to maintain an edge.
It’s for that reason that we’re excited to announce today that we are investing $5 million into RavenPack, the big data analytics provider for financial services. With very little funding, and no previous institutional investment, the team working out of Marbella, London and New York, have built one of the world’s leading data analytics platform. They can now count 70% of the world’s leading hedge funds as their clients. As the Vice Chairman of the Wolfe Research and Wall Street’s top- ranked quantitative analysts put it, “RavenPack has become a vital source of information for quantitative investors.”
Today the company also hit another milestone in their lifetime, launching their product as a self-service platform. This will enable investors across the spectrum to curate their own sentiment analysis on specific stocks. The new platform will monitor market- moving events, and can quickly surface insights by combining a wide variety of data sets, including stock prices, geopolitical events, newsflow, social media activity, weather, apps and even data from the internet of things. Within an ever- connected world, RavenPack’s mission is to enable investors to make better decisions in uncertain and emotion- driven markets. We are excited to partner with them on that journey.
