Contract Win of the Year: Crux Informatics

While the ability to ingest, clean and structure datasets has traditionally been an activity for financial companies, there is growing interest among market participants to offload tasks that provide limited differentiating value so they can devote more time on higher-value tasks such as interpreting and analyzing data. This year’s Contract Win of the Year, as voted by readers, is awarded to Crux Informatics, which supports various financial companies, including systematic investment manager Two Sigma, to do just this.

Founded in 2017, Crux Informatics is solving data headaches for financial companies looking to offload the commoditized portions of their data delivery and operations. The company is run by Philip Brittan, who previously led product development for Thomson Reuters’ financial and risk division, and was global business manager for foreign exchange at Bloomberg. 

In September 2018, Crux Informatics announced it was supporting Two Sigma in performing critical processes to extract, validate and load data. “The benefit for Two Sigma—as it is for all of our clients—is that they are able to offload time-consuming and frustrating data ingestion work to us so they can free up resources to focus on the more esoteric tasks of finding alpha and extracting insights from the data,” says Brittan. “We do the non-controversial work of wiring up, downloading, and checking and storing the data in a consistent way. We have operators who watch the feeds and call a vendor if the data is late or if the feed goes down; we take care of all those standard operations on behalf of every client.” 

As part of the partnership, Two Sigma made a minority equity investment in Crux Informatics, joining Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investment Group and Citi, two of Crux Informatics’ other investors. Brittan says the $20 million Series B funding will allow Crux Informatics to hire more engineers, developers and sales staff to enhance its platform and build a scalable operation quickly and efficiently. 

“Two Sigma saw value in our managed service and became a customer, and they also shared our vision for the industry as a whole—for Crux to be a utility that can do this work on behalf of multiple customers, bringing economies of scale and best-of-breed practices—which is why they became an investor as well,” Brittan says. 

Crux Informatics has so far raised $41 million in funding over three rounds. Goldman Sachs invested $10 million in November 2017, and Citi invested $11 million four months later. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners