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.

StrictlyVC is hosting its first event as a part of TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, and in the event you’re an investor seeking to connect along with your peers, you will not need to miss this chance.

The StrictlyVC series – bringing the people and stories from the front pages on to an audience of primarily VCs, LPs, founders and operators – gets to the center of Disrupt 2024 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 29, from 3 a.m. to six p.m. 18:00

Featuring previous speakers including VC Katie Haun, FTC chief Lina Khan and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the event marks the primary time StrictlyVC has coordinated one in all its boutique events as a part of parent company TechCrunch’s much larger Disrupt program. This can be the primary time a StrictlyVC event isn’t recorded, as we head straight for a conversation concerning the changing industry amidst drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

We couldn’t have dreamed of a greater lineup that may reflect the terrain. Guest speakers for this special StrictlyVC event include VC’s Aileen Lee Cowboy venturesWesley Chan z FPV venturesand Alex Pall and Drew Taggart of The Chainsmokers; institutional investors Rick Prostko z Ontario Teachers’ Pension PlanJessica Archibald z Top-class capital partnersand Beezer Clarkson z Sapphire ventures; and our afternoon show partners, Nirmal Utwani from Amplitudeand Wład Woroniński z Helm.ai.

If you should hear the true deal from top VCs and LPs, mark this record in your calendar. You can get investor passes at a pre-sale price here.

It was quite a surprise when Adam Selipsky stepped down as CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit. Perhaps an equally big surprise was that he was replaced by Matt Garman. Garman joined Amazon as an intern in 2005 and became a full-time worker in 2006, working on early AWS products. Few people know the corporate higher than Garman, whose last position before becoming CEO was as senior vp of sales, marketing and global services for AWS.

Garman told me in an interview last week that he hasn’t made any significant changes to the organization yet. “Not much has changed in the organization. “The business is doing quite well, so there is no need to make huge changes to anything we are focusing on,” he said. However, he identified several areas where he believes the corporate must focus and where he sees opportunities for AWS.

Emphasize start-ups and rapid innovation

One of them, somewhat surprisingly, is startups. “I think we have evolved as an organization. … In the early days of AWS, our main focus was on how to really attract developers and startups, and we got a lot of traction there from the beginning,” he explained. “And then we started thinking about how do we appeal to larger businesses, how do we appeal to governments, how do we appeal to regulated sectors around the world? And I think one of the things that I just emphasized again – it’s not really a change – but I just emphasized that we can’t lose focus on startups and developers. We have to do all these things.”

The second area he wants the team to focus on is maintaining with the whirlwind of change within the industry.

“I even have really emphasized with the team how essential it’s for us to proceed to remain on the forefront that we’ve by way of the set of services, capabilities and features and functions that we’ve today – and proceed to lean forward and construct the plan motion involving real innovation,” he said. “I think the reason customers use AWS today is because we have the best and broadest set of services. The reason people turn to us today is because we continue to deliver industry-leading security and operational efficiency by far, and help them innovate and move faster. We must continue to implement the action plan. “It’s not likely a change in itself, but that is probably what I highlighted essentially the most: how essential it’s for us to take care of the extent of innovation and the speed at which we deliver products.”

When I asked him if he thought possibly the corporate hadn’t innovated fast enough up to now, he said no. “I think the pace of innovation is only going to accelerate, so it’s just important to emphasize that we also need to accelerate the pace of innovation. It’s not that we’re losing it; it is simply an emphasis on how much we need to accelerate given the pace of technology.”

Generative Artificial Intelligence in AWS

With the emergence of generative AI and technology changing rapidly, AWS must be “on the cutting edge of all of them,” he said.

Shortly after ChatGPT’s launch, many experts questioned whether AWS was too slow to launch generative AI tools on its own and left the door open to competitors like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. However, Garman believes that this was more imagination than reality. He noted that AWS has long offered successful machine learning services like SageMaker, even before generative AI became a buzzword. He also noted that the corporate has taken a more thoughtful approach to generative AI than perhaps a few of its competitors.

“We were looking at generative AI before it became a widely accepted thing, but I will say that when ChatGPT came out, it was kind of a discovery of a new area and how to apply this technology. I think everyone was excited and energized by it, right? … I think a group of people – our competitors – were kind of racing to put chatbots at the top and show that they are leading the way in generative AI,” he said.

Instead, Garman said, the AWS team desired to take a step back and take a look at how its customers, whether startups or enterprises, could best integrate the technology into their applications and leverage own, differentiated data. “They will need a platform that they will construct on freely and consider it as a platform to construct on relatively than an application that they will customize. That’s why we took the time to construct this platform,” he said.

In the case of AWS, that platform is Bedrock, where it offers access to a big selection of open and proprietary models. Just doing this – and allowing users to attach different models together – was a bit controversial on the time, he said. “But for us, we thought that was probably where the world was going, and now it was certain that that was where the world was going,” he said. He said he thinks everyone will want custom models and provide their very own data for them.

Garman said the bedrock is “growing like a weed right now.”

One problem with generative AI that it still wants to resolve is price. “A lot of this is doubling down on our custom silicon and making some other changes to the models to draw the conclusion that you’re going to be building (something) much cheaper into your applications.”

Garman said the following generation of AWS’s custom Trainium chips, which the corporate debuted on the re:Invent conference in late 2023, will likely be launched later this 12 months. “I’m really excited that we can really turn this cost curve around and start delivering real value to customers.”

One area where AWS hasn’t necessarily tried to compete with a few of the other tech giants is in constructing its own large language models. When I asked Garman about this, he noted that these are still issues the corporate is “very focused on.” He thinks it is vital for AWS to have its own models while still using third-party models. But he also desires to ensure AWS’s own models can bring unique value and differentiation, either through leveraging its own data or “through other areas where we see opportunities.”

Among these areas of opportunity are costs, but in addition agents, which everyone within the industry seems optimistic about for the time being. “Having models that are reliable, at a very high level of correctness, and can call other APIs and do things. “I think there is some innovation that can be done in this area,” Garman said. He says agents will gain way more utility from generative AI, automating processes on behalf of their users.

Q, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence

At the recent re:Invent conference, AWS also unveiled Q, its AI-powered generative assistant. Currently, there are mainly two versions of this solution: Q Developer and Q Business.

Q Developer integrates with a lot of the most well-liked development environments and, amongst other things, offers code completion and tools for modernizing legacy Java applications.

“We really think of Q Developer as a broader sense of really helping throughout the developer lifecycle,” Garman said. “I think a lot of early developer tools focused on coding, and we’re thinking more about how do we help with everything that’s painful and labor-intensive for developers?”

At Amazon, teams used Q Developer to update 30,000 Java applications, saving $260 million and 4,500 years of developer labor, Garman said.

Q Business uses similar technologies under the hood, but focuses on aggregating internal company data from many various sources and making it searchable using a ChatGPT-like Q&A service. The company “sees a real driving force there,” Garman said.

Shutting down services

While Garman noted that not much has modified under his leadership, one thing that has happened recently at AWS is that the corporate announced plans to shut down a few of its services. Traditionally, AWS hasn’t done this fairly often, but this summer it announced plans to shut down services just like the Cloud9 web IDE, CodeCommit competitor GitHub, CloudSearch and others.

“It’s sort of a clean-up where we looked at a number of services and either, frankly, introduced a better service that people should move to, or we launched one that we just didn’t get better,” he explained. “And by the way, some of them we just don’t do well, and their traction has been quite poor. We looked at it and said, “You know what? The partner ecosystem actually has a better solution and we intend to build on it.” You cannot put money into every part. You cannot construct every part. We do not like to do that. We take this seriously if firms wish to rely on us to support their activities in the long run. That’s why we’re very careful.”

AWS and the open source ecosystem

One relationship that has long been difficult for AWS – or no less than has been perceived as difficult – is its relationship with the open source ecosystem. This is changing, and just just a few weeks ago AWS contributed its code to the OpenSearch Linux Foundation and the newly formed OpenSearch Foundation.

“I think our view is pretty simple,” Garman said after I asked him what he thought in regards to the future relationship between AWS and open source software. “We love open source. We rely on open source code. I feel we’re attempting to leverage the open source community, making an enormous contribution to the open source community. I feel that is what open source is all about – benefiting from the community – and that is why we take it seriously.”

He noted that AWS has made key investments in open source software and a lot of its own open source projects.

“Most of the friction has come from firms that originally began open source projects and then decided to sort of decommission them from open source, and I feel they’ve the appropriate to do this. But you recognize, that is not the true spirit of open source. Whenever we see people doing this, take Elastic for instance, and OpenSearch (AWS’ ElasticSearch fork) is sort of popular. … If there’s a Linux (Foundation) project, or an Apache project, or the rest that we will construct on, we would like to construct on that; we contribute to them. I feel we’ve evolved and learned as a company learn how to be good stewards of this community, and I hope that has been noticed by others.