Selerity Gets $3M to Speed Development of Alerts
February 14, 2013
Selerity said it raised $3 million to accelerate the development of a new real-time intelligence platform.
The Selerity Alerts platform will allow securities traders, analysts, portfolio managers and other professionals to receive breaking, real-time intelligence based on their specific investment theses and interests.
“We will be in production in 2013,” says Ryan Terpstra, Selerity founder and CEO. “The current beta project is delivering live event intelligence now to a group of financial services firms.”
Terpstra
The funding comes a Series B round of equity financing. New shareholders include Mark Faulkner, founder of Data Explorers; Tom Glocer, former chief executive of Thomson Reuters; Emanuel Mond, former chairman of Cadis; Lee Olesky, chief executive of Tradeweb; and, Sharon Rowlands, chief executive of Altegrity.
A majority of Series A shareholders and board of directors also reinvested as part of the round. These include Donal Smith, chairman of Selerity; Doug Atkin, former president and chief executive of Instinet; and Roger Ehrenberg, former chief executive of DB Advisors.
Selerity’s platform takes in news and related data on breaking events that impact financial markets, sifts it and reclassifies it for use in automated trading.
Using proprietary algorithms, the service combs through hundreds of thousands of events per day at sub-second speeds from sources including social media, local media, regulatory agencies, and authoritative blogs. The events are then analyzed by Selerity's in-house event analysts. Relevant information and analysis gets delivered to clients.
“These in-house analysts are capital market specialists in specific industries,” Terpstra says.
Subscribers fall into several buckets. “Hedge fund traders will use the information for trading, but they also want to be ‘in the know’ so that if the portfolio manager comes over and asks what’s going on, they’ll have the answer,'' he says.
Additionally research analysts are subscribers. “They use the information as input to build an investment mosaic,” Terpstra notes.
In January, Selerity partnered with content provider Markit, which provides intraday dividend announcements, and Terpstra notes that the addition of other content partners is a possibility. The company is also looking to expand its international and local content.
