Boston Fintech Dec 2013 Demo Day
Ten companies from the Boston area came and demoed their products and talked about their companies to a crowd of about 50 people on a dark and messy New England evening.
We met in an interesting and awkward space on Summer Street just over the bridge from downtown Boston. The space had 2 large touchscreen displays with a U shaped couch and a very large coffee table. All of the spectators stood behind the couches looking over each other’s shoulders.
The mood was positive and everyone was very engaging with the companies presenting.
Ty Danco coordinated the event and kept us all moving along. Each presentation was 7 minutes long with a 7 minute question and answer period. There were 3 of us on the panel: Adam Broun, Kensho; Doug Nelson, Devonshire Investors; and Michael T Pullen, frictionless design.
Here is a brief description of the companies or their products in their words and a link to their site.
- Abine – DoNotTrackMe 3.0 blocks companies from tracking your browsing and helps protect your personal info online. MaskMe keeps you private as you browse and shop the web, and creates and manages secure passwords. Masked Cards allow you to shop the web without ever giving away your real credit card number. Instead, create and use unique, disposable credit cards in the amount you specify. It’s like a pre-paid gift card that you can create on the fly as you shop.
- Bison – Bison delivers industry intelligence. Bison provides a powerful search function, relevant news coverage, and complete fundraising datasets for the private equity and venture capital market. They help see more investment opportunities, provide new evaluation tools, and facilitate communication with managers.
- Boston Technologies – Boston Technologies is a provider of software, solutions, services and trading platforms to institutional and retail brokerage speculative traders in the foreign exchange, CFD (contracts for difference), commodities, futures and options marketplace.
- Buyside FX – Buyside FX builds trade optimization software that helps buy side firms improve pre-trade processes, reduce risk, and make more informed decisions with better data.
- Capital Market Exchange – Capital Market Exchange provides investment teams an intuitive analytic platform underpinned by current market data to enhance decisions and mitigate risk.
- Kensho Techonologies – Kensho’s Acumen is a user-friendly interactive research environment that enables portfolio managers and researchers to quickly and easily perform sophisticated quantitative analyses in a fraction of the time spent by institutional research teams today.
- Quantopian – Quantopian is the world’s first algorithmic trading platform in your browser. They provide tools and infrastructure to learn, create, test, and trade algorithmic strategies – while protecting intellectual property.
- Samurai Investments – Powerful cloud-based trading tools for the aspiring investor. Backtesting engine quickly assess the performance of strategies over years of historical market data. Algorithmic trading automatically identities and reacts to trade opportunities that are free of hasty snap decisions, or costly hesitations. Point-and-click interfaces guides the user through every step of the way while providing advanced tools and an extensive knowledgebase for the more experienced.
- Tripleshot – Tripleshot is a venue for dark pool trading. Tripleshot lets users actively search for a buy-side block without giving up symbol, side, or size.
- Varden Technologies – Varden’s core product, eReportal, is the leading Client Reporting, Communications and Portal platform in the financial services market. eReportal allows firms to communicate with their clients by delivering a platform that includes: data aggregation, report design, workflow management, audit controls, automated distribution, secure portal and tablet/smartphone access.