Fintech OpenBB aims to be more than just an ‘open source Bloomberg terminal’

A newly established fintech startup OpenBB reveals the following step in its plans to tackle among the top names on the earth of investment research. The company is launching a brand new, free version of the product that may make its arsenal of monetary data and tools available to more users.

OpenBB is the work of a software engineer Didier Lopeswhich launched its Python-based platform in 2021 to enable investors and amateur enthusiasts to conduct investment research using various datasets at no cost via a command-line interface (CLI). The company moved on raise $8.5 million in seed financing from OSS capital and business angels reminiscent of Ram Shriramone in every of Google’s early supporters.

Although the community-driven open source project has amassed some 50,000 usersOpenBB can be constructing an enterprise incarnation called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives teams access to the interface; ready-made integrations with databases; some Excel add-in; and various security and support add-ons that may appeal to larger firms.

OpenBB has several well-known clients, which include shipping and logistics firms Pangea logistics solutions and an unnamed investment firm that Lopes said has $6.4 billion in assets under management.

However, OpenBB is now struggling to attract customers who might otherwise use Bloomberg Terminal or products from upstarts reminiscent of AI market research startup AlphaSense, which was valued at $4 billion in June 2024.

Final speed

Brand latest OpenBB Terminal – not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB terminal which was launched at startup sunset in March — is a full-fledged web application, although without lots of Terminal Pro’s premium features. It is fully customizable, can run on any operating system or platform, and provides access to AI OpenBB co-pilot. Like Sunset OpenBB Terminal, the brand latest web application can be free to use.

The OpenBB Terminal is maybe something of a middle ground between the CLI-oriented nature of an open source project and the feature set of an enterprise product.

“There was a big disconnect between the open source community we had built and the enterprise offering because the enterprise product wasn’t accessible to everyone,” Lopes told TechCrunch.

The OpenBB terminal serves as a single endpoint for accessing financial information from roughly 100 data sources, covering stocks, options, forex, macroeconomics and more. Users may also add all their latest data to the combination – the community has already contributed financial data sets reminiscent of historical exchange rates AND cryptocurrency price data. There are also tons of extensions and toolkits that stretch OpenBB’s functionality – e.g AI stock evaluation agent.

Users can freely incorporate their very own AI systems and huge language models (LLM), which might be especially necessary for security and compliance use cases. But with OpenBB Copilot, classified as “complex artificial intelligence system”, users can immediately run queries on their data in natural language.

Lopes highlighted one particularly quirky use case to show why a more flexible financial research platform may be desirable for some firms.

The case in query involved a shipping company using OpenBB to connect its email accounts to a customized AI co-pilot to ask questions like “?” Or “?”

But also they are exploring ways to integrate other data to help make pricing decisions.

“They’re using artificial intelligence to go through all the emails, and that’s a lot of unstructured data that’s hard to parse,” Lopes said. “But their ultimate goal is to be able to ask questions based on emails, but also structured data such as oil prices, so that the co-pilot can offer the best price based on all that data.”

As with many community-driven products, OpenBB essentially uses the OpenBB Terminal to reach individuals who – in the long term – may also help drive sign-ups within the premium enterprise incarnation.

“If you see companies like AlphaSense (and others), they have really large sales departments and everything is very outgoing,” Lopes said. “We want to take a totally different path, using product-led development. We want analysts, researchers, funds and so forth to use our product at no cost and invite others on their team to use it.

OpenBB currently employs 15 distributed employees, and Lopes is looking to hire several more leaders. He also said he made offers to some individuals with experience at major financial research firms.

“This hiring will likely put more workers on our runway, so we will likely be adding staff in the near future,” Lopes said.

The Bloomberg factor

OpenBB has been compared to Bloomberg Terminal from the start, and it is simple to assume that the “BB” within the name is a nod to its well-known rival. But Lopes says that is not the case.

For context, Lopes said each he and his co-founder Jakub Maslek mid-pandemic, he lost money betting on firms memes crazeby which shares of publicly traded firms reminiscent of Gamestop and BlackBerry rose and fell dramatically on the back of social media hype. And so Lopes launched the GameStonk terminal early 2021 aggregated financial data for listed firms and competitors; SEC filings; earnings reports; and even market sentiment transmitted via social networks reminiscent of Reddit and Twitter.

AND article in Vice magazine on the time called the GameStonk terminal as “.”

One sec Bloomberg Terminal it’s indispensable for a lot of and has develop into something of an ordinary within the financial industry; costs roughly $25,000 per user per yr. The GameStonk terminal was free, and initial interest convinced Lopes to quit his engineering job and deal with GameStonk full-time. It was related rebranding to OpenBB in early 2022 “to show we are serious about the company,” as Lopes wrote on the time, and lift $8.5 million in seed funding.

“When we developed our seed stage as an open-source platform — with a command-line interface offering financial data integration — people easily characterized us as an ‘open-source Bloomberg,’” Lopes said. “But the ‘BB’ in our name comes from the BlackBerry stock exchange, where both my co-founder and I lost money in the stock market.”

While the comparisons are comprehensible, OpenBB will not be an exact substitute for Bloomberg Terminal just because the startup is unable to compete on the size and size of a more established product.

“If you see us as a successor to Bloomberg Terminal, it doesn’t really work because they have too much data,” Lopes said. “No other company in the world has as much data as Bloomberg.”

Moreover, Bloomberg Terminal packages built-in chat function which allows users to communicate with one another in real time, enhancing the “flywheel” effect similar to a conventional social network. This is something that OpenBB could replicate and is designed in order that the corporate can easily use messaging in the long run as each OpenBB Hub user already has their very own unique profile and username.

“If we decided to chat, we could use these profiles and usernames and then it wouldn’t be too difficult,” Lopes said. “But it’s not on the roadmap yet.”

OpenBB, alternatively, gives users the flexibleness to construct their very own front-end interface, add features and extensions to the open source product, and customize it until the cows come home.

While this highlights that ultimately the 2 products serve different purposes, even in the event that they overlap, OpenBB could still face legal difficulties.

Approximately 18 months after the OpenBB rebrand registered for a trademark received its name last yr, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published a request to launch a 30-day period by which the general public can object to the grant of the trademark. As the deadline approached, the USPTO received a request for a 90-day extension, which it granted, but most interestingly, the request was submitted by Bloomberg.

Lopes said he had not heard directly from Bloomberg concerning the potential trademark dispute, adding that he was not concerned provided that the “BB” in his company’s name will not be a reference to Bloomberg.

“If we used the word ‘BBG,’ which is what people usually use as an abbreviation for Bloomberg, we would understand it,” Lopes said. “But the word ‘BB’ is a big misuse.”

So if it isn’t trying to be an “open source alternative to Bloomberg,” then what’s it trying to be?

“Our ultimate goal is to create the best AI-powered research and analysis workspace, building as much open source software as possible,” Lopes said.