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The Murphy brothers' software-selling family tree
In their own words: Chris Dyl, CTO, Turbine Inc.
In their own words: Sanjay Vakil, founder, LuckyCal Inc.
Massachusetts is accruing a financial web cluster, with several companies launching in the past two years.
The latest addition, Boston-based Currensee Inc., will launch next month in closed beta with its online network of real-time trade data for foreign currency traders. Already in the sector, The Updown Corp. of Cambridge and Brighton House Associates LLC of Marlborough both launched in March 2007. Updown provides fantasy stock trading, and Brighton House offers a directory of investors for fund managers.
Why locate in Boston? Talent, said Updown co-founder and CEO Michael Reich. “From a business development perspective, New York would be better for us,” said Reich. In addition to advertising, Updown is looking to reap revenue from licensing fees with other financial media sites. So far, the site youngmoney.com has signed up, Reich said.
Updown, which Reich reported has reached 115,000 users, has offices in the Cambridge Innovation Center. “I’m not even sure New York has a facility that’s similar,” Reich said.
Currensee launched last May as Tradual Inc. with a $2.4 million tranche of a $4 million Series A round from Waltham-based North Bridge Venture Partners. The site allows foreign exchange traders to anonymously share trade data.
“We’re able to continuously show you what the rest of the community is doing — whether they’re long or short, what the entry points are, or whatever it is,” said CEO Dave Lemont. “We’re probably going to learn how people use this information over time.”
Lemont, who formerly headed up Burlington-based AppIQ Inc., co-founded the company with Avi Leventhal, a former foreign exchange trader, and Asaf Yigal, former director of professional services for Onaro Inc., which was acquired by NetApp Inc. in January 2008.
While Currensee is just launching, Brighton House Associates soon hopes to dominate what its founders see as a growing market for fund managers seeking information about potential investors.
Third-party placement agents charge a “super-high success fee,” said Dan McDermott, a former placement agent to hedge funds who founded Brighton House with Dennis Ford, a former VP of business development at Refresh Software Corp. in Chelmsford.
The pair are betting that all fund managers really need is an investor profile to target their fundraising. Brighton House has profile data for 7,500 investors, detailing what kinds of investments each seeks to make. Fund managers pay to access the data, which has become the largest pool available, Ford said.
“There’s so much money going through there it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Every day we put up more profiles and we do more mandates. It’s going to be really hard for people to catch up to my company.”
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