In the age of “diamond-handed” growth investors and message board stock jockeys, does anyone even analyze stocks any more?
Israel-based online stock research firm TipRanks is betting that the answer is “yes.” The company, which offers solutions that enable investors to quickly analyze stock market data and the performance of market analysts, secured a $77 million investment in a round led by technology group Prytek last month. The funding will help the nine-year old fintech take advantage of the surging interest in trading and investing by retail customers.
TipRanks leverages Natural Language Processing technology to review and analyze data from a wide variety of sources including analyst forecasts, financial bloggers, insider activity, news sentiment, and both the collective wisdom of individual investors on the platform as well as the actual investments by top hedge fund managers. A two-time Finovate Best of Show winner, TipRanks offers quantitative tools like its Smart Score for stocks and its Star Ranking System for analysts to allow investors to quickly assess a stock’s prospects or the value of a given analyst’s opinion.
“In addition to being the only company that ranks analysts based on their performance rather than the prestige of the bank they work for, we are the only company that makes aggregated analyst ratings available to retail investors,” TipRanks co-Founder and CEO Uri Gruenbaum said. “We analyze all finance-related news, corporate filings, analyst research, and social media to provide retail investors with the same level of information that only institutional investors can afford. By doing so, we enable retail investors to make data-driven investment decisions.”
The investment takes TipRanks’ total funding to $80 million. The company will use the new capital to add to its workforce, having experienced a significant jump in demand for its solutions in 2020. TipRanks noted that it has more than four million monthly users in the wake of a 3x boost for its subscription-based services last year. Gruenbaum added that TipRanks also plans to expand its research coverage to include other asset classes and markets such as cryptocurrencies and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The new partnership will also give TipRanks access to Prytek’s tools and datasets which bring greater transparency to online investment advisory. Founded in 2017, Prytek is an Israel-based multinational technology group that specializes in investing in new technologies and delivering managing services to companies in financial services and other verticals via its Business Operating Platform-as-a-Service model (BOPaaS).
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