In the information age of today, insightful data is the most valuable commodity ! When data is being generated in such huge amounts, collecting all the right data, connecting the dots and providing insightful analysis that can be easily used by the consumers is the best form of service that can exist in the world of today. A FinTech company in the Analytics/Big Data industry, Heckyl is doing exactly this.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” ]Heckyl mines data from across 1.5 Million sources to provide actionable insight in real time for financial markets. The aggregation and clustering of data with the use of proprietary technology is what makes Heckyl stand out.[/box]
Heckyl’s FIND (Financial in News and Data) Platform
Heckyl is a real time data analytics company that brings news, price and fundamental analytics through a single platform called FIND (Financial in News and Data). The functioning of FIND can be broken down into 3 main categories.
Data Collection :- Collects unstructured data from multiple sources such as real-time news, information and market data from companies, businesses and global markets data, recommendations from brokers and analysts around the world, information from Social Media and Open Data sources.
Connecting the Dots :- Through the use of proprietary technology such as sentiment-tagging, news-
Actionable Insight :- These trends are then represented in the form of insights and alerts in a ready-to-use & actionable manner that can be useful to researchers, traders,brokers and analysts.
How Heckyl Started
Heckyl was founded in December 2010.Mukund Mudras, Som Sagar, Abhijit Vedak and Jaison Mathews are the co-founders. All of them are Engineers and before starting up, they were working together in the Fixed Income vertical at Merrill Lynch Technologies for almost 3 years.
Around 4 years back, when the co-founders were working with the traders in US, they discovered that the social media, open database space was really exploding in terms of information and they could see the value it could add in the financial space. Based on their interactions with the traders at Merrill Lynch, the team of 4, felt a genuine demand for such kind of a product.
While the traders had all the tools necessary for making the big calls, they were still trying to explore this space. It was then that the founders of Heckyl thought of capturing all the information in the public space and making it available to the retail traders who at that point of time had no single platform to make the news available to them.
This is how in 2010, Heckyl set up business as a 4-member co-founding team from the four walls of home of one of the co-founders. The company added its 1st employee in 2010.
Growth Story Till Now
A little into 4 years plus of operations, Heckyl has grown to a team of 23 employees. Heckyl boasts of a swanky new office at Powai, Mumbai’s own start-up valley. From the clientele perspective, Heckyl are the analytics provider to more than 4 million users where 4,00,000 customers are on their platform through some of the larger brokerage firms. Heckyl is already operational in India and UK.
The Competition
In Heckyl’s specific product line, the company does not face direct competition who is trying to solve the problem of unstructured data and open data sets, at this large a scale. If it is as a solution, seen in isolation, one will tend to find different leaders in that domain: For News and Data analytics: there is Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, DowJones, Markit, and Morningstar. For expertise in Data Visualization there is Tableau, Qlik etc.
The Challenges
Like every company in the startup world, Heckyl too faced challenges in their initial days to create awareness about and position their product. Their product was of a global proposition and nobody was aware of such a product. Heckyl’s offering was a first of its kind in the Indian financial market, therefore they had to invest their time in attending seminars and positioning their product in those meets, several educational initiatives were undertaken to spread awareness of such a product potential.
The other bigger challenge was to win over customers’ trust in accepting an Indian based technology product. The co-founders had to spend some time with the customers to prove that Heckyl was here to stay and that those customers would have support in the times to come.
The product is targeted at Brokerages and Financial institutes and when the product was launched, the financial markets were going through a tough phase and no one was ready to spend money on anything. However in some time the customers did see the merit and the value add Heckyl were bringing to their trading platform and then customers started signing.
Team at Heckyl
The team at Heckyl is full on energy and enthusiasm. At Heckyl, there is a celebration latched to every new customer order acquisition because of the new opportunities that the team earns to continuously innovate, be creative and stay alive with its core root of creating something more amazing each time.
In the Next 1 Year
Product Portfolio Expansion :- The company is currently focusing on introducing new product platforms that will change the way the financial industry uses analytics to drive their businesses. Heckyl plans on building its thought leadership through various knowledge driven content such as blog, case studies and other knowledge resources.
Geographical Expansion:- In India the company is planning to on-board more institutions in the BFSI sector, they are looking forward to entering into the South East Asia and US markets within the year.
Team Expansion:- Heckyl is also looking to add new capabilities within the team and targets to expand to a team strength of 35 within a year. This would help them to have key resources within the team to meet larger project deliverables.
Regarding Funding
IDG Ventures and Seedfund are the current investors in Heckyl. As the company is planning to enter into new geographies, developing new products and hiring new talent, they are open to the idea of funding.
