TickerTags Gets Seed Funding, Pre-Launch

TickerTags’ founders invested nearly $1 million of their own money into the company over the past two years while setting it up, and this week closed a $1.5 million funding round led by 2M Companies, Inc., and also including ValueStream Labs.

Chief executive and co-founder Chris Camillo says the company will use the money to fund operations for the next year—when it plans to conduct a series A fundraising round—much of which revolves around the cost of acquiring and processing data, curating its growing library of tags, and supporting machine-learning and natural-language processing technologies.

The vendor’s data costs not only include the “tremendous amount” of data that TickerTags buys direct from Twitter, but also various other feeds of different data, such as financial and non-financial news, social forums and blogs that it overlays on top of the Twitter chatter and stock prices. This allows users to monitor any acceleration or deceleration in chatter for specific keyword or phrase tags that are relevant to their investment.

Aside from supporting those costs, the vendor also plans to develop standalone products for specific areas, such as municipal bonds, currencies, or private placement markets, and to continue refining the accuracy of its tag libraries to support these additions. Camillo says the vendor is seeing a broad base of interest, ranging from self-directed investors and registered investment advisors to quantitative and hedge funds looking for new sources of data to deliver fresh insight, as well as analysts within large investment banks.

“The industry is interested in ‘social,’ but is still trying to find out what ‘social’ means, and how they can work it into their daily workflow, track half a billion tweets per day, and derive insight from that,” he says.

Therefore, TickerTags will release its investor- and professional-level versions of its web platform into a private beta test environment—though anyone can request access—and will release apps for Apple iOS and Android devices around six weeks later, followed after another three months by an API access aimed at institutional clients wanting automated access.

“The API will be a big part of our product offering, and we are already in discussions about syndication and about clients using it,” Camillo says. “A big part of our distribution strategy will hinge on syndication of the TickerTags taxonomy in other platforms. Our goal is to have that become the backbone of other analytics platforms,” he says, since TickerTags already has some 350,000 tags—which is expected to grow to a million over the next two years—and covers 20,000 securities, 2,000 of which have associated tag libraries (for example, a company like Apple might have 600 tags that are relevant to the company and its business). In addition, the platform supports users adding their own “private” tags for their own use only.