StockViews Raises £250K to Grow Machine Learning, AI Capabilities

The funding comes from the London Co-Investment Fund and three angel investors, including angel syndicate Craigie Capital and the former head of Fidelity International, Thomas Balk, who has also joined StockViews' board as chairman. Balk spent 16 years at Fidelity, where he also held positions including president of mutual funds in Europe and president of the firm's Japanese business.

StockViews will use the funds to expand its sales and engineering teams, and to develop the platform's technology to improve the quality of its crowd-sourced research, as well as the speed at which it can be published, says StockViews chief executive Tom Beevers.

The vendor will also make significant investment in adding artificial intelligence use cases to the platform, Beevers adds. Despite the fact that StockViews co-founder and chief technology officer Sandeep Bathina has a background in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Beevers says the company has not been "particularly vocal" about taking the platform in this direction as "getting the human element right" and assembling a team of analysts and a network were more important short-term goals, he says.

Having now secured funding, StockViews can spend more time exploring how it can incorporate AI and other technologies into the product in the future.

"We want to explore how we can use machine learning and AI to improve the quality of research that our analysts are producing.... AI, if used in isolation, doesn't produce particularly good results, but if you use it in combination with human judgment and human analysis, it can have much stronger results," Beevers says, adding that the areas where this lends itself the most seamlessly is quarterly or annual company financial results, which can sometimes run into hundreds of pages.

"When a set of results comes out and you want to analyze them rapidly, where you're responding to an event and trying to make sense of data that has just been released, that can be difficult to do from a human perspective," he says, adding that the vendor can use machine learning and AI to look at that data for anomalies and interesting aspects of that data quickly, and to compare the results to historic and recent trends, as well as to pick out anomalies based on what peers are reporting. "The machine can then put those anomalies in front of the analyst and indicate what's worthy of further research. The analyst still makes the final decision to whether it's interesting or not, or whether it's worthy of further analysis, but the machine is sorting through a lot of the data to make suggestions for consideration," which could otherwise take a human several days, he says.

Any AI element the vendor releases─the first of which will probably come out towards the end of this year─will be supplementary to its platform, rather than replacing any existing components, and will be released incrementally. "The main value in our platform is the crowdsourcing element. I think that we have a network of smart analysts all looking at the problem in different ways.... We're trying to look at AI in a collaborative way," Beevers says.

After hiring a designer at the start of the year, StockViews now has five staff, and the funding will also allow the company to grow its headcount to a "mid-sized team," Beevers says, adding that the vendor's next hires will probably be an engineer and a salesperson in London, potentially followed by an additional salesperson in the US, depending on growth.