Thasos Group Assets Acquired By Market Service Inc.

All assets belonging to New York-based Thasos Group have been sold off to Market Service, Inc. (MSI), WatersTechnology has learned. Based in Long Island, NY, Market Service Inc. also owns AggData, another seller of location data. Thasos’ assets will be used under the MSI brand, a spokesperson for MSI said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s understood that the sale price was low compared to Thasos’ $42 million valuation from last year, according to two other sources familiar with the deal.

In September 2019, Business Insider reported that then-Thasos CEO and co-founder, Greg Skibiski, had stepped down, and the vendor cut roughly two-thirds of its staff. Throughout August and the first-half of September 2019, the 40-person staff was reduced to just 12, according to that report.

More details will be officially released by the company in the coming weeks, according to the spokesperson.

AggData offers a series of services. It’s Premium account provides unrestricted access to more than 6,500 datasets. According to its website, each dataset is extracted from primary sources and updated regularly. It provides historical data to examine trends over time, it provides access to a real-time API that connects AggData’s information directly into the user’s system, and it provides custom lists. While the spokesperson declined to say how Market Service would use Thasos’ assets, AggData and Thasos would clearly make a good pairing.

Lots of Promise

Thasos Group was one of the more interesting alternative data providers to hit the market at a time when this sector was really starting to take off. Founded in 2011 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the vendor would take satellite images and location data from mobile phones to provide actionable trading information around foot traffic.

As an example, it had an offering called Streams, a time-series data service based around consumer traffic to retail stores or a company’s headcount, which can be leading indicators of company-level or broader macroeconomic health.

The Streams are broadly segmented collections of ticker-by-ticker data for metrics that can be measured based on the presence and movement of people in or to certain locations. Thasos launched its Consumer Streams service in March 2017, which at the time covered 150 companies, and monitored foot traffic in retail stores and restaurants, for example. Shortly thereafter the vendor launched its Non-Consumer Streams, then covering 200 companies, and providing figures for the number of people employed—and hours worked—in manufacturing jobs, or the number of patients staying in a hospital.

Then, in the summer of 2017, Thasos launched Mall REITS Stream, which analyzed consumer foot traffic within shopping malls to determine with greater precision which stores shoppers are visiting, how long they spend there, and what impact that could have on a retailer’s earnings. In 2019, it rolled out a superset of products specific to quantitative hedge funds called QStreams, which also monitored real-time foot traffic. QStreams provided subscribers with daily customer visitation and other fundamental metrics for every individual store, restaurant, factory, or other location owned or operated by more than 480 companies. It also was able to look back on four years of collected data. 

Thasos had a lot of promise, in part, because of the company it kept. By summer of 2017, it had close to 25 hedge fund clients. Its investors, employees, and advisors included PDT co-founder Ken Nickerson, Acadian Asset Management founder Gary Bergstrom, former D.E. Shaw chief risk officer Peter Bernard, MIT Media Lab co-founder Alex “Sandy” Pentland, and Andrew Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Skibiski, himself, was the founder and CEO of Sense Networks, which used machine learning to create insights around mobile phone location and carrier call pattern data. The company was later acquired by YP, which was formed was from the merger of AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T Interactive, with Cerberus Capital Management holding a controlling stake.

In August, 2018, Skibiski joined the Waters Wavelength Podcast to discuss the alternative data sector and provides insights into some of the challenges, trends and use cases for this information. Click here to listen.