Young fintech startup OpenBB reveals the next step in its plan to take on the heavyweights of the investment research world. The company is launching a new free version of a product that will open its arsenal of financial data and tools to more users.
OpenBB is the work of a software engineer Didier Lopeswhich launched the Python-based platform in 2021 to enable amateur and enthusiast investors to perform investment research using different datasets for free, via a command line interface (CLI). The company then raise $8.5 million in start-up financing OSS Capital and angel investors such as Ram Shriramone of Google’s earliest backers.
Although the community open source project has collected some 50,000 usersOpenBB has also built a corporate incarnation called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives teams access to an interface, predefined database integrations, a Excel Add-inas well as various security and support elements likely to appeal to larger companies.
OpenBB claims high-profile clients including transport and logistics company Pangea logistics solutions and an unnamed investment company, which Lopes said has $6.4 billion in assets under management.
However, OpenBB is now looking to attract the type of customers who might otherwise be tempted to check out Bloomberg Terminal or products from newcomers like AlphaSense, AI business intelligence startupwhich reached a valuation of $4 billion in June 2024.
Terminal velocity
The brand new OpenBB terminal – not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB terminal as startup ended in March – is a full-fledged web application, although it removes many of Terminal Pro’s premium features. It is fully customizable, can run on any operating system or platform, and provides access to an AI-enabled tool. OpenBB Co-pilot. Like the previous OpenBB terminal, the brand new web application is also free.
OpenBB Terminal is perhaps a sort of happy medium between the CLI centrality of the open source project and the feature set of the enterprise product.
“There was a big gap between the open source community that we created and the enterprise offering, because the enterprise product was not accessible to everyone,” Lopes told TechCrunch in an interview.
The OpenBB Terminal serves as a single endpoint for accessing financial information from over 100 data sources, covering stocks, options, forex, macroeconomics, and more. Users can also bring all their new data into the mix – the community has already contributed financial data sets such as historical exchange rates And cryptocurrency price data. There are also a host of extensions and toolkits to bring more functionality to OpenBB, such as an AI stock analysis agent.
Users are free to incorporate their own AI systems and large language models (LLMs), which can be particularly important for security and compliance use cases. But with the OpenBB Copilot, classified as a “compound AI system”, users can run natural language queries on their data from the start.
Lopes highlighted a particularly novel use case to demonstrate why a more flexible financial research platform might be desirable for some businesses.
The case in question involved a shipping company using OpenBB to connect its email accounts to a custom AI co-pilot to ask questions like “Which ships are currently near Rio de Janeiro?” » or “Which ships are heading to South Africa?”
But they’re also looking for ways to integrate other data to help inform pricing decisions.
“They’re using AI to go through all their emails — and that’s a lot of unstructured data that’s hard to analyze,” Lopes said. “But their ultimate goal is to be able to ask questions based on their emails, but also structured data like oil prices, so their co-pilot can suggest the best price based on all that data.”
As with many community products, OpenBB essentially uses OpenBB Terminal to target people who could, in the long run, help drive signups for the premium business incarnation.
“If you see companies like AlphaSense (and others), they have very big sales departments, everything is very outbound,” Lopes said. “We want to take a completely different path, leveraging product-led growth. We want analysts, researchers, funds, etc. use our product for free and involve others on their team.
OpenBB today claims a distributed headcount of 15 employees, with Lopes keen to bring in a few more executives – and he said he has extended offers to some with experience at some of the search industry’s biggest companies financial.
“This hire is probably going to eat into our runway more, so we’ll probably raise (more funding) in the near future,” Lopes said.
The “Bloomberg” factor
OpenBB has been compared to Bloomberg Terminal since its inception, and it’s easy to assume that the “BB” in its name is a nod to its archrival. But Lopes says no.
For context, Lopes said that he and his co-founder James Maslek had lost money betting on companies amid the pandemic craze for meme stockswho saw shares of publicly traded companies like GameStop and BlackBerry rise and fall dramatically due to hype generated by social media. And so Lopes launched the Gamestonk terminal early 2021, to consolidate financial data on publicly traded companies and their competitors; SEC Filings; income reports; and even market sentiment, conveyed by social networks such as Reddit and Twitter.
A feature article in Vice magazine At the time, Gamestonk Terminal was referred to as “the DIY meme stock version of Bloomberg Terminal.”
While Bloomberg Terminal is indispensable for many and has become something of a financial industry standard, it costs around $25,000 per user per year. Gamestonk Terminal was free, and the initial traction convinced Lopes to leave his engineering job and focus on Gamestonk full-time. This implied name change to OpenBB in early 2022 “to show we were serious about the company,” Lopes wrote then, raising $8.5 million in seed funding.
“When we launched our seed round as an open source platform – with a command line interface offering financial data integration – it was easy for people to characterize us as ‘open source Bloomberg.’ ” Lopes said. “But the ‘BB’ in our name comes from the BlackBerry ticker, where my co-founder and I were losing money in the stock market.”
While the comparisons are understandable, OpenBB isn’t exactly a replacement for Bloomberg Terminal, simply because the startup can’t compete with the scale and scale of the more established product.
“If you’re looking at us as a replacement for Bloomberg Terminal, it doesn’t really work because they have so much data,” Lopes said. “No other company in the world has as much data as Bloomberg.”
Additionally, Bloomberg Terminal packs integrated chat functionality which allows users to communicate with each other in real time, thus reinforcing its “flying” effect in the manner of a traditional social network. This is something OpenBB could replicate, and it was designed in such a way that it would be quite easy for the company to adopt messaging in the future, with each user on its OpenBB hub already having their own profile and their own username.
“If we decided to chat, we could access these profiles and usernames, and it wouldn’t be very long from there,” Lopes said. “But it’s not on the roadmap yet.”
On the other hand, OpenBB gives users the flexibility to create their own front-end, add features and extensions to the open source product, and customize it until the cows come home.
While this shows how the two products ultimately serve different purposes, even if they overlap, legal hurdles could still arise for OpenBB.
Some 18 months after the rebranding, OpenBB registered a trademark its name last year, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently publishing the application to initiate a 30-day period during which the public can raise objections to the granting of the trademark. As the deadline approached, the USPTO received a request for a 90-day extension, which it granted – but the most interesting thing was that the request was submitted by Bloomberg.
Lopes said he had not heard anything directly from Bloomberg about the potential trademark dispute, adding that he was not concerned given that the “BB” in his company’s name is not a reference to Bloomberg.
“If we used ‘BBG,’ which is Bloomberg’s usual abbreviation, we would understand,” Lopes said. “But ‘BB’ is a big expanse.”
So if this isn’t about being an “open source alternative to Bloomberg”, what does it mean? East is it trying to be?
“Our main goal is to be the best AI-powered research and analysis workspace, creating as much open source as possible,” Lopes said.