alternative-data
(5)
Jon Jacobson
Jon Jacobson is the co-founder, Group CEO and CTO of Omnisient, a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that lets banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations share and analyze consumer data without exposing raw personal information. A software engineer with more than 25 years building data platforms, he founded Omnisient in South Africa in 2019 to attack a specific problem: nearly two billion people are shut out of affordable financial services because they lack the behavioral data lenders use to assess risk. His platform uses cryptography to tokenize and match datasets locally, turning loyalty-card and retail data into alternative credit signals.
Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay is the co-founder and CEO of Apptopia, a Boston-based app intelligence company that turns mobile app data into signals used by investors, brands and developers. He started Apptopia in 2011 as an online marketplace for buying and selling apps, backed early by Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher, then rebuilt it into a data business whose forecasts and estimates are relied on by clients including Google, Visa, Target, Microsoft, Zoom and NBC. Kay took over as CEO in 2021 as the company raised a $20 million Series C and doubled down on serving hedge funds and public-market investors with predictive mobile metrics.
Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie, a New York-based data and analytics company that has become a core information provider for institutional crypto investors. The Tie's SigDev Terminal and APIs deliver real-time sentiment, news, and market data to hedge funds, trading desks, banks, and exchanges. Frank left a post-trade consulting role at SS&C Technologies in 2018 to build the company full time, and has since grown it into one of the most widely used data platforms serving the professional side of digital assets.
Brad Schneider
Brad Schneider is the founder and CEO of Nomad Data, a New York based AI platform that helps teams find, buy, and read the data hidden inside documents and external vendors. An MIT-trained engineer turned hedge fund investor (Tiger Management, Jericho Capital) and CFA charterholder, he spent a decade using alternative data to beat markets before deciding the harder problem was simply finding the right data in the first place. Nomad Data lets users describe what they need in plain English and routes them to answers, not raw spreadsheets, with products spanning data discovery, a Doc Chat engine for unstructured text, and vendor relationship management for consultancies, insurers, and asset managers.
Vinesh Jha
Vinesh Jha is the founder and CEO of ExtractAlpha, an independent alternative-data research firm that turns messy datasets into tradable signals for hedge funds and institutional investors. A pure-mathematician-turned-quant, he cut his teeth ranking Wall Street analysts at StarMine, built systematic strategies at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and PDT Partners, then went out on his own in 2013. After ExtractAlpha merged with the crowdsourced-estimates platform Estimize in 2021, he runs both, leading a team spread across Hong Kong, the US, Europe, and Canada with a near-religious insistence on rigorous, point-in-time testing over a good story.