RavenPack Launches Big Data Analytics Platform, Secures $5m Funding

Officials say the platform will allows users to monitor market-moving events, and quickly discover insights by combining a wide variety of datasets, including stock prices, geopolitical events, news, social media activity, payments data, weather, apps, and data from the Internet of Things.

The new platform allows both systematic and discretionary or fundamental users to analyze proprietary text documents, emails, instant messages, PDF documents, filings, research reports, legal contracts, or any other textual content, such as websites, and to create and download custom datasets, and visualize data and share insights across their organization.

RavenPack chief executive Armando Gonzalez says the new product was made possible by the vendor making strides in its ability to analyze large bodies of text, enabling it to apply its sentiment analysis to any primarily text-based source. “We got faster at analyzing large amounts of text, such as long documents,” he says, whereas before RavenPack specialized in just news stories. “We can now analyze 100-page documents at the same speed that we used to analyze a news story,”

For existing clients, this means the platform can take in “research reports, long documents, anything coming into an organization… and analyze it in a fraction of a second, and then deliver the analytics in a consistent and standardized format in the same way that they’re accustomed to getting news and sentiment analysis from us to date,” Gonzalez adds.

The vendor has also changed the way it delivers data. Historically, RavenPack delivered information in flat files. As most of RavenPack’s clients are “quantitative in nature,” they want the analytics that the vendor derives from text or news delivered in a simple CSV format, Gonzalez says.

The new self-service product is aimed at non-systematic data users. “We have infrastructure in the cloud that allows the user—whether they are a quantitative, fundamental or discretionary user—to pick and choose the data that they want,” he says. “If you only care about data for the S&P 500,  you can say ‘Here are the 500 companies that I care about, and I only want this sentiment score and this other sentiment technique, and I only want categories for the market moving events, and that’s it…. I only want it for those companies and I only want things which are highly novel and published in the last seven days.’”

Users can define these filters via the user interface or a web API. The system automatically slices the data for users in the cloud, so that it delivers “exactly the data you define,” Gonzalez says. “This makes it very powerful for a discretionary user that works in Excel…. They don’t want to download a lot of data; they just want to download a small portfolio for certain things that they want to test… [and] they want it only a daily basis, and they want to make sure that Excel is able to manage it. They can use our self-service platform to define the dataset that they want and then bring it into Excel.”

Gonzalez says the vendor has been speaking to many fundamental shops who are “very keen” to incorporate this technology as they don’t have the resources to access RavenPack’s data via its traditional delivery mechanisms. “There’s an overall demand for Big Data analytics… a huge demand for alternative data. A lot of these fundamental shops don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to access it, and they don’t have infrastructure to be able to leverage it,” he says.

RavenPack has also seen growing use of its service among risk management and compliance teams, “both for data provision and for offering RavenPack as a service where they can start plugging in legal documents and emails, and any internal information that the firm is looking to process and tag for potential compliance or regulatory issues,” Gonzalez says, adding that the vendor is already doing this for some clients. For example, one client uses the platform to analyze internal and external instant messaging communications as well as emails. “We can plug in the IM feeds and process every message and tag them for sentiment, for mentions, for connections, events and other items that a compliance officer may be looking for. All of this is sub-second. It’s instant surveillance and analysis of internal information communication,” he says.

Separately, RavenPack has also secured $5 million in funding from Draper Esprit, a London-based venture capital firm focusing on technology companies. The vendor will use the cash injection to expand the platform to more users, expand its saleforce, and make product and technological advancements to the platform.