Fintech OpenBB aims to be more than an ‘open source Bloomberg Terminal’
Reading Time: 5 minutesFledgling fintech startup OpenBB is revealing the next step in its plans 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 data and financial tooling to more users.
OpenBB is the handiwork of software engineer Didier Lopes, who launched the Python-based platform back in 2021 as a way for amateur investors and enthusiasts to do investment research using different datasets for free, via a command line interface (CLI). The company went on to raise $8.5 million in seed funding from OSS Capital and angel investors such as Ram Shriram, an early backer of Google.
While the community-based, open-source project has amassed some 50,000 users, OpenBB has also been building an enterprise incarnation called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives teams access to an interface; pre-built database integrations; an Excel add-in; and various security and support bolt-ons that would appeal to larger businesses.
OpenBB claims some big-name customers that include shipping and logistics company Pangaea Logistics Solutions and an unnamed investment firm, which Lopes says has $6.4 billion in assets under management.
However, OpenBB is now looking to attract the kinds of customers that might otherwise be tempted to check out Bloomberg Terminal or products from upstarts like AI market intelligence startup AlphaSense, which raised at a $4 billion valuation in June 2024.
Terminal velocity
The all-new OpenBB Terminal — not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB Terminal that the startup sunsetted in March — is a fully-fledged web app, though it strips out many of the premium features of Terminal Pro. It’s fully customizable, can run on any operating system or platform, and provides access to an 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 the open source project and the bells-and-whistles feature set of the enterprise product.
The OpenBB Terminal serves as a single end-point for accessing financial information from some 100 data sources, spanning equity, options, forex, the macro economy and more. Users can also throw all their new data into the mix — the community has previously contributed financial datasets such as historical currency exchange rates and crypto pricing data. There are also a slew 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 might be particularly important for security and compliance use-cases. But with the OpenBB Copilot, categorized as a ‘compound AI system,’ users can run natural-language queries about their data out of the box.
Lopes highlighted one particularly quirky use-case to demonstrate why a more flexible financial research platform might be desirable to some companies.
The case in question concerned a shipping company using OpenBB to connect their email accounts with a customized AI copilot to ask questions such as, ‘What vessels are currently near Rio de Janeiro?’ or ‘What vessels are heading toward South Africa?’
But they are also looking at ways to integrate other data, to help inform decisions around prices.
‘They are using AI to go through all of their emails — and that’s a lot of unstructured data that’s hard to parse,’ Lopes said. ‘But their ultimate goal is to be able to ask questions based on their emails, but also on structured data such as oil prices, so their copilot might be able to suggest the best pricing based on all of that data.’
As with many community-driven products, OpenBB is basically using OpenBB Terminal to target individuals who may — in the long run — help drive signups for the premium enterprise incarnation.
‘If you see companies like AlphaSense [and others], they have really big sales departments, it’s all very ‘outbound’,’ Lopes said. ‘We want to go a completely different way, where we leverage product-led growth. We want to have analysts, researchers, funds, and so on using our product for free, and bringing other people from their team onto it.’
OpenBB claims a distributed workforce of 15 employees today, with Lopes keen to bring in a few more leaders — and he said he has put some offers in to some with experience at some of the biggest companies in the financial research space.
‘This hiring will probably eat more into our runway, so we are likely going to 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 big-name rival. But Lopes says it’s not.
For context, Lopes said that both he and his co-founder James Maslek had lost money betting on companies during the mid-pandemic meme stock craze, which saw stock from publicly-traded companies such as Gamestop and BlackBerry rise and fall dramatically due to social media-driven hype. And so Lopes launched GameStonk Terminal in early 2021 to aggregate financial data on publicly traded companies and competitors; SEC filings; earnings reports; and even market sentiment, conveyed through social networks such as Reddit and Twitter.
A feature article in Vice magazine at the time referred to GameStonk Terminal as a ‘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 in the region of $25,000 per user annually. GameStonk Terminal was free, and the initial traction convinced Lopes to quit his engineering job and focus on GameStonk full-time. This involved rebranding as OpenBB in early 2022, ‘to show that we were serious about the company,’ as Lopes wrote at the time, raising $8.5 million in seed funding.
‘When we raised our seed round as an open source platform — with a command line interface offering financial data integration — it was easy for folks to characterize us as an ‘open source Bloomberg’,’ Lopes said. ‘But the ‘BB’ in our name came from the BlackBerry ticker, where both my co-founder and I were losing money in the stock market.’
While the comparisons are understandable, OpenBB isn’t exactly a drop-in replacement for Bloomberg Terminal, simply because the startup cannot compete with the scale and magnitude of the more established product.
‘If you’re looking to us as a replacement for Bloomberg Terminal, that doesn’t really work because they have so much data,’ Lopes said. ‘There’s no other company in the world that has as much data as Bloomberg.’
Moreover, Bloomberg Terminal packs built-in chat functionality that allows users to communicate with each other in real-time, bolstering its ‘flywheel’ effect much like a traditional social network. This is something that OpenBB could replicate, and it has been designed in such a way that would make it easy enough for the company to embrace messaging in the future, with each user on its OpenBB Hub already having their own unique profile and username.
‘If we decided to have chat, we can tap into those profiles and usernames, and it wouldn’t be a big stretch from there,’ Lopes said. ‘But it’s not yet on the roadmap.’
On the flip side, OpenBB gives users the flexibility to build out their own front-end interface, add features and extensions on top of the open source product, and customize ’til the cows come home.
While this highlights how the two products ultimately serve different purposes, even if they do overlap, there could still be legal headwinds ahead for OpenBB.
Some 18 months after rebranding, OpenBB filed to trademark its name last year, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently publishing the application to kickstart a 30-day period where the public can raise objections to the trademark being granted. With the deadline approaching, USPTO received a request for a 90-day extension, which it granted — but what was most interesting was that the request was submitted by Bloomberg.
Lopes said that he’s not heard anything from Bloomberg directly about the potential trademark tiff, adding that he’s not worried given that the ‘BB’ in his company name isn’t a reference to Bloomberg.
‘If we were using ‘BBG,’ which is what people normally use as an abbreviation for Bloomberg, we’d understand,’ Lopes said. ‘But ‘BB’ is a big stretch.’
So, if it’s not trying to be an ‘open source alternative to Bloomberg’, what IS it trying to be?
‘Our top-line goal is to be the best AI-powered research and analytics workspace, building as much open source as possible,’ Lopes said.
Ref: techcrunch
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