Eagle Alpha, a startup which scans online chatter to discern profitable trading patterns, has scored $1.2 million in funding from individual industry investors.
Founded in September 2012 by a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, Emmett Kilduff, Eagle Alpha trawls the Web for non-traditional investment information that can be used to guide trading strategies.
He says the capital will be used for product development and the recruitment of engineers. The $1.2 million raised this time around, follows a $1.5 million round in February this year.
The company claims to have signed up 40 buy and sell-side clients for its first product Web Watch, which scours the Web for actionable market intelligence. Its second product, Internet Insights, will launch in early 2015 and offer fundamental insights from the Internet on the world’s largest 1000 stocks and macro topics.
Roberto Hoornweg, one of Eagle Alpha’s new investors and former co-head of global fixed income at UBS, says: "Capturing relevant and actionable information in a timely manner from the web has become impossible without intelligent technology. Eagle Alpha's Web Watch offers an innovative solution that adds value to clients with a simple and scalable business model.”
Eagle Alpha’s investors and advisory panel now includes individuals from Barclays Capital, CQS, Deutsche Bank, Schroders and - most recently - Twitter. In July this year, Evan Weaver, Twitter’s former technical architect, joined the company to help flesh out its technical architecture roadmap.
Kilduff says Eagle Alpha will complete another round of fundraising - this time a Series A round - in early 2015.