As many readers of this blog know we have done a fair amount of research into the financial services sector. From an IT standpoint, we think that this represents one of the largest opportunities today given the legacy IT base as well as a serious willingness on behalf of pretty much the entire category to stay ahead of the curve. One category that we have looked into a ton is the market and economic research space. We are talking about the $70b+ ocean with about 80 years of legacy infrastructure brought to you by companies like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Markit, FactSet, S&P, ipsos, Kantar, and others. Related to Bowery’s thesis, CTOs and CIOs are constantly telling us about the need to ‘rip and replace’ many of these old solutions for new.
As a result, today we announce our investment in Premise. Premise plays broadly in the market research space and focuses on giving banks, hedge funds and others the ability to track large portfolios of product pricing, discount and availability. They aggregate this data from around the world via both online (think SKU level eCommerce data) and offline (think physical, in-store product pricing) sources and in turn develop significant market research and indexes.
This information helps hedge funds trade individual stocks, banks to understand macro trends around Consumer Price Index (CPI) and GDP, brands to analyze competitive dynamics in product pricing, and governments to understand scarcity and price shocks. They help these customers move from a largely offline, Excel spreadsheet-driven world where constant customer service is a necessity to a scalable, real-time infrastructure that requires less time and effort to make work.
When founders David Soloff and Joseph Reisinger first told me about their vision to “increase economic transparency on a global scale” I was blown away by the sheer size of the problem. After getting through the “how the heck are you actually going to do this?” we immediately became excited by their methodical path to grow early customers and revenue.
This drive is something we look for in all Bowery companies and we know how hard it is to build revenue scale with a small amount of funding and an on-premise product. While this is the company’s unveiling to the world, we began the journey with Premise some time ago participating in their Seed round via an angel investment of mine that transferred in to Bowery.
When it came time to raise their Series A we were happy to get more involved and support the company. In sum, we’re excited to back David and Joe again alongside our friends at Google Ventures and Harrison Metal and look forward to building the future of the market research category. You can read more about the funding here.
