View from the Office

I met up with Armando Gonzalez, the CEO of RavenPack and founder of Bigdata.com, at the company’s offices in Tribeca. 

RavenPack has provided news sentiment and other sophisticated analytics to Wall Street quants for almost two decades. Now, it’s expanding into consumer markets. 

Armando’s career started with a single, fateful decision that came in the early 2000s as he was finishing his senior year in college. 

A native of San Diego, he was studying economics at The American University of Paris when he was invited to be the only student representing the university at a conference. 

At the event, he met AI researchers who convinced him that there was a big opportunity in Natural Language Processing. With their support, he landed grants and started RavenPack in his apartment.

It’s hard to convey how far ahead of the pack he was at the time. Sentiment analysiswas virtually unknown back then; now, it is widely used on Wall Street.

By 2003, he hired his first employees and began a five-year R&D phase. The group initially focused on processing web data but soon shifted to licensing high-quality news sources.

In 2008, RavenPack partnered with Dow Jones to launch its first product, designed for hedge funds seeking machine-readable financial news. 

Over time, RavenPack developed  tools for sentiment analysis, market-moving event detection, and a taxonomy of 7,000 types of financial events and more than 80 market indicators.

A few weeks ago, RavenPack launched Bigdata.com, an AI research assistant for business and finance professionals. 

Armando said he first had the idea for Bigdata “over a decade ago,” when he acquired the domain name and U.S. trademark. The emergence of large language models has expedited the project. 

He sees Bigdata.com as an opportunity to democratize access to the investment signals used by Wall Street professionals by providing a platform that is easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive. 

It took a long time to get here, but now is the right moment, he said.