Astrocyte Research

Finding Alpha

Vendr for Investors brought to you by World Leading Domain Experts and Data Vendors

Context: The audience for this deck is the internal team at Astrocyte Research for alignment on the short-term and long-term visions of a scalable, multi-stakeholder marketplace for the data alternative market charging MRR fees to small investors and ARR fees to largest institutions. The format and order of the deck outline follows the DocSend Startup Fundraising Playbook. Randy's hope is to ensure overall alignment before a specific pitch is crafted for Eagle Alpha and other marketplace partners.

A web viewable versions can be found here (with publishing on GitHub via Netlify):
https://fervent-swartz-463d29.netlify.app/

A Google Docs version for commenting and edits here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16zkieJneeicE3zJvOOfE9ozh0r3XEl-Q0cS-GSS8N2M/edit?usp=sharing

Intro

α.gif

Company Purpose

Finding Alpha - findingalpha.io, findingalpha.club

Wisdom of the Experts
Finding Alpha is a marketplace connecting investors with the top alternative data sources and experts to optimize alpha for profits.

Problem

Bad data and market friction = financial & opportunity costs
Good data and UX = profit & competitive advantage

Alternative data is hard to find and even harder to use within the private financial models of investment institutions leading to long and expensive sales cycles for alternative data vendors.

Solution

Our marketplace of alternative data vendors and modeling experts makes data discoverable and usable within our AI platform or on the investor's own data stack.

We enable investors to subscribe to over 1000 alternative data sources, financial models by domain experts, and proactively react to market changes with our industry leading AI Breakpoint technology.

Market Size

42de8e018b461a3720c45e2cc262389d.png

Why Now?

With the emergence of data lake technology powered by cheap storage coupled with exponential growth of online and offline data sources, the era of democratizing the approaches of Renaissance Technologies (AUM $165B, $0.53B per FTE) for the investment masses is now upon us, where unique data insights led to have an alpha edge.

A data marketplace leader will capture the 0 to 1 aspects of this emerging market and technology projected to have worth over $40B by 2028. At a 1% take rate, this represents a $4B IPO on $400M in revenue expected at software industry average of 90% margins.

Product - Alternative Data Marketplace

World Leading Data Vendors with Expert Models on An Easy to Use Platform for Investors

  1. Marketplace with over 1000 good alternative data sources with 10K experts distributing their models
  2. Interactive platform for backtesting and validate the data and data models
  3. SaaS & PaaS data hosting platform with proactive streaming data model monitoring (Breakpoint AI)

29a1991bb22c4df9f20d3a4bb1619438.png

Competition

Sentieo - 207 FTEs
S&P Global Marketplace - 112 FTEs
Atlan Grid - 97 FTEs

Traction

Traction on each side of the marketplace with key players:

  1. Quiver and New Constructs - Top Alternative Data Vendor
  2. Eagle Alpha - Top Data Integration Partner
  3. Volos, ExAnte, Roundhill - Marketplace Customers Investors

Executive Leadership Team

Sean Kruzel
CEO
7e955fc256bcb9c476ff6af072f873f3.png 9bed1fb8c8836aad3b91126e048325d7.png69b977f04e4efb4d942737af52a47827.png

Jeff Corrado
Head of Market Intelligence
17a385cbb6238ee24f72c304bf6bdb40.png 0bcd919daaa5cd430a27b7ffe5e2e2c9.png309d0368f04c8db0bec8ab76a0c536a6.png

Business Model - Marketplace for alternative data and models

SaaS/MRR with self-serve data use by smaller investor and PaaS/ARR for larger investors

Note to Sean: put time on Randy's calendar to get a create unit economics-based business model

Substack for Expert Data Models and Vendr for Alternative Data Vendors

  1. Marketplace - Marketplace for alternative data and models curated by world leading experts

645774e55a8e77c1fcbeaef33dbb1565.png

At Vendr’s midpoint 2.5%, those figures rise $50,000 to $87,500.

DataKitchen for Investors (Data + Platform + Services)

  1. Data marketplace - It pays, literally, to have the cleanest data. Enhance and backtest your trading strategy with better data to optimize alpha. See Integrations for the list of available alternative data sources. You'll need to sign in to see the full list and gain access to the expert marketplace.
  2. Enhanced Platform - Need an additional feature or need data sources added? Leverage the top AI/ML talent in the industry to deliver firm-specific platform enhancement to meet your needs.
  3. Self-Hosted Platform - Need to self-host big data data ingestion and process to enhance your alpha? Leverage the top AI/ML talent in the industry for custom solutions built on our extendable alternative data platform.

Acquisition

Partner channels (i.e. Eagle Alpha) with established customers will cross-sell with a revenue sharing into the platform where we will automate the lower end customers (individual investors and RIAs) needs while offering custom data platform integration and solutions to the higher end customers (Large RIAs groups, Hedge funds, and financial institutions)

af48592cb60fd3310cc1a52e4608553f.png

Exit

Our expectation in the current market is that we will acquired for both our platform and in-house talent with a 10x ROI within in the next 24 months. If there isn't a 10x offer on the table, we will continue building towards our long-term vision of becoming the Snowflake for the Finance Industry ($67.94B IPO).

Snowflake for the Finance Industry - Board Only

We have built our technology foundations on same tech as Snowflake (https://youtu.be/OJb8A6h9jQQ?t=466, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/snowflake-running-millions-of-simulation-tests-with-amazon-eks/) but combining the alternative data source needs for predicting future events. We started proving the model as industry experts and consultants, and we are looking to expand the approach to democratize data and AI/ML across the finance industry.

Appendix

Alternative Name - AltData Kitchen (AltDataKitchen.com), AltData Experts (AltDataExperts.com)

Trusted and transparent data collaboration leads to better financial gains
"AltData Kitchen is a core ingredient for healthy financial returns and the Breakpoint monitoring protected my assets when the fundamentals on one of my investments was changing" says John Smith, world renowned economist.

Business Model Inspirations

As there exists direct alternative data marketplaces yet due to the high barriers to entry, let's look at what business models give us inspiration:

References

General Improvements for Astrocyte Research