Fledgling fintech startup OpenBB is revealing the next steps in its plan to take on the heavyweights of the investment research world. The company is launching a new free version of its product that will open up its arsenal of data and financial tools to more users.
OpenBB is the brainchild of software engineer Didier Lopes, who launched it in 2021 as a free way for amateur investors and enthusiasts to conduct investment research using a variety of datasets via a command line interface (CLI). We launched a Python-based platform. The company has since raised $8.5 million in seed funding from angel investors including OSS Capital and early Google backer Ram Shriram.
This community-based open source project has amassed around 50,000 users, but OpenBB is also building an enterprise version called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives your team access to the interface. Pre-built database integration. Excel add-in. and a range of security and support bolt-ons that are attractive to large enterprises.
OpenBB said its customers include shipping and logistics company Pangea Logistics Solutions and an unnamed investment firm that Lopez said manages $6.4 billion in assets, among other large clients. That's what it means.
But OpenBB is now trying to attract the kind of customers who might want to check out offerings from startups like Bloomberg Terminal and AlphaSense, an AI market intelligence startup that raised money in June 2024 at a $4 billion valuation.
terminal velocity
The all-new OpenBB Terminal (not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB Terminal, which the company discontinued in March) is a full-fledged web app, but many of Terminal Pro's premium features have been removed. It is fully customizable, runs on any operating system or platform, and provides access to the AI-enabled OpenBB Copilot. Like the previous OpenBB Terminal, the all-new web app is also free to use.
OpenBB Terminal is perhaps something of a middle ground between the CLI-centricity of an open source project and the bells and whistles set of an enterprise product.
“There was a huge disconnect between the open source community that we built and the enterprise product because enterprise products weren't universally accessible,” Lopez said in an interview with TechCrunch.
OpenBB terminal. Image credit: OpenBB
OpenBB Terminal serves as a single endpoint for accessing financial information from approximately 100 data sources, including stocks, options, foreign exchange, macroeconomics, and more. Users can also throw any new data into the mix. The community previously provided financial datasets such as historical exchange rates and crypto price data. There are also a number of extensions and toolkits to bring even more functionality to OpenBB, such as an AI stock analysis agent.
Users are free to incorporate their own AI systems and large-scale language models (LLMs). This can be especially important for security and compliance use cases. But OpenBB Copilot, which is classified as a “complex AI system,” allows users to instantly run natural language queries on their data.
OpenBB copilot. Image credit: OpenBB
Lopes brought up one particularly bizarre use case to illustrate why a more flexible financial research platform is desirable for some businesses.
In the case in question, a shipping company uses OpenBB to connect its email account to a customized AI co-pilot that asks questions such as “What ships are currently near Rio de Janeiro?” It was. or “What ship is heading to South Africa?”
But they're also looking at ways to integrate other data to help make pricing decisions.
“They're using AI to go through every email, and that's a lot of unstructured data that's hard to parse,” Lopez said. “But their ultimate goal is to be able to ask questions based not only on email, but also on structured data like oil prices, so that the co-pilot can use all that data to determine the best We may be able to suggest pricing.”
Like many community-driven products, OpenBB primarily uses OpenBB Terminal to target individuals who may be encouraged to sign up for premium enterprise in the long run.
“When you look at a company like AlphaSense; [and others]they have a very large sales department and everything is very ‘outbound,’” Lopez said. “We want to go down a completely different path, leveraging product-led growth. We want analysts, researchers, funds, etc. to use our product for free and we want to We want to bring other people into this product.”
OpenBB currently claims to have a distributed workforce of 15 people, and Lopez hopes to bring on several more leaders, including several with experience at some of the largest companies in the financial research field. He said he had made an offer to Kani.
“This hire will probably cut into our runway even more, so we'll probably get a raise.” [more funding] In the near future,” Lopez said.
“Bloomberg” factor
OpenBB has been compared to Bloomberg Terminal since its inception, and it's easy to assume that the “BB” in its name pays homage to its famous rival. But Lopez says that's not the case.
For context, Lopez said he and co-founder James Maslek lost money betting on companies during the meme stock boom in the midst of the pandemic. Share prices of publicly traded companies such as GameStop and BlackBerry have increased significantly due to the influence of social media. Media-driven hype. So Lopez launched the GameStonk terminal in early 2021 to aggregate financial data for publicly traded companies and competitors. SEC Filings; Earnings Reports. Even market sentiment conveyed through social networks such as Reddit and Twitter.
A feature article in Vice magazine at the time called the GameStonk terminal a “DIY meme stock version of the Bloomberg terminal.”
The Bloomberg Terminal is essential to many people and has become something of a standard in the financial industry, but it costs around $25,000 per user per year. GameStonk Terminal was free, and the initial momentum led Lopes to quit his engineering job and focus on GameStonk full-time. This included rebranding as OpenBB and raising $8.5 million in seed funding in early 2022 “to show that we are serious,” as Lopez wrote at the time. .
“When we raised our seed round as an open source platform with a command line interface that provides financial data integration, it was easy for people to characterize us as the 'Bloomberg of open source,'” Lopez said. “But the 'BB' in our name comes from the BlackBerry ticker, which both my co-founder and I were losing money on in the stock market.”
While this comparison is understandable, OpenBB is not a complete replacement for Bloomberg Terminal. Because the startup cannot compete with the size and scale of more established products.
“If you're looking to us as a replacement for the Bloomberg Terminal, it doesn't really work because they have too much data,” Lopez said. “No other company in the world has as much data as Bloomberg.”
In addition, the Bloomberg Terminal includes a built-in chat feature that allows users to communicate with each other in real time, reinforcing the “flywheel” effect similar to traditional social networks. This is something that can be replicated with OpenBB, as each user on the OpenBB hub already has their own unique profile and username, which is designed to make it easier for the company to introduce messaging in the future.
“If you decide to chat, you can utilize their profile and username, and from there it's not that difficult,” Lopez said. “But it's not on the roadmap yet.”
On the other hand, OpenBB gives users the flexibility to build their own front-end interfaces, add features and enhancements to open source products, and customize until the cows come home.
This highlights how the two products ultimately serve different purposes, but even if they overlap, there may still be legal headwinds for OpenBB.
Approximately 18 months after the rebrand, OpenBB applied to trademark its name last year, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published the application, allowing members of the public to object to the trademark grant. A 30-day period has begun. As the deadline approaches, the USPTO has received and granted a 90-day extension request. But what was most interesting was that the request was filed by Bloomberg.
Lopez said he hasn't heard anything directly from Bloomberg about the potential trademark TIFF, adding that he's not concerned given the “BB” in the company's name does not refer to Bloomberg.
“It would be understandable if we used 'BBG,' which is what people usually use as an abbreviation for Bloomberg,” Lopez said. “However, 'BB' is quite unreasonable.”
So if you're not trying to be an “open source alternative to Bloomberg,” what exactly are you trying to be?
“Our biggest goal is to build as much open source as possible and become the premier AI-powered research and analytics workspace,” said Lopes.