The votes have been cast and financially-relevant crowd intelligence provider Sentifi is among the winners of the Swisscom Startup Challenge 2018.

“I would like to send my sincere thank you to the trust of our investors, and to all Sentifiers who have worked hard to make Sentifi a global player,” Sentifi CEO and founder Dr. Anders Bally said. “This would not have been possible without your contribution, commitment and belief in creating the most powerful financial AI and big data based collective intelligence system in the world.”

Sentifi founder and CEO Dr. Anders Bally demonstrating Sentifi Alerts at FinovateEurope 2017.

Sentifi bested more than 230 rivals to win the challenge. Along with five other winning companies, Sentifi will participate in a one-week business accelerator program in October, and receive mentoring from Swisscom and venture lab experts. The jury consisted of members of the Swisscom Group Executive Board, Swisscom Ventures, and business angels and investors. Sharing the winner’s circle with Sentifi are AAAccell, an AI-powered asset and risk management solution provider; rovenso, a maker of agile seeing robots; Dotphoton, a raw image compression solution; and Exeon Analytics, a cybersecurity firm.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Sentifi demonstrated its Sentifi Alerts solution at FinovateEurope last year. Sentifi Alerts scours more than five million relevant sources from the news media, blogs, and social networks to signal investors when significant events in the financial markets occur. The customizable, real-time alerts give investors the opportunity to make timely adjustments to their asset holdings – whether to seize new opportunities or minimize potential risks.

Sentifi appointed Marina Goche as Chief Operating Officer in May. The same month, the company announced that Walter Berchtold, an industry veteran with board and executive experience at Credit Suisse and Falcon Private Bank, would join Sentifi’s advisory board. Last month, Sentifi teamed up with Argus Data Insights, integrating its crowd intelligence technology with Argus Predict IndustryScan solution.

Courtesy of a new partnership with the Bombay Stock Exchange, Sentifi will begin providing Asia’s first (“and fastest”) stock exchange with social media updates on 40,000 stocks, currencies, and commodities from around the world. The updates will be available on the Bombay Stock Exchange website and will include a ranking of the most widely-discussed stocks, a longitudinal comparison between market attention and stock price, “most relevant and influential voices,’ trends driving market attention, and more. The goal is to make it easier for investors to take advantage of the most relevant information and market sentiment data available on social media while at the same time avoiding “information overflow.”

Pictured: Sentifi founder and CEO Andres Bally demonstrating Sentifi Alerts at FinovateEurope 2017 in London.

Explaining his company’s technology, Sentifi founder and CEO Andres Bally said “With an AI-based technology platform built over the past four years, Sentifi extracts insights of billions of (data points) while at the same time reduces this information to a summary of a handful (of) events and pattern events driving market attention and (the) valuation of stocks.” Bally credited the combination of the “social media sharing culture” with big data and self-learning algorithms for making technology like Sentifi’s possible, adding that “the financial information market is in a paradigm shift providing a better understanding of market attention and financial value drivers than ever before.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Sentifi demonstrated Sentifi Alerts at FinovateEurope 2017, and unveiled its MySentifi ecosystem last fall at FinovateAsia 2016 in Hong Kong. Winner of the Swiss Fintech Award in 2016, Sentifi has raised more than $7 million in funding from private investors in New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as the company’s native Switzerland.