Here’s our year end wrap at Pricing Culture, which I joined as a co-founder earlier this year.

Pricing Culture started 2024 mainly focused on selling data about collectibles. We ended the year offering a suite of content about a wide variety of alternative data.

It was a big pivot that we are excited to talk about because we expect specially-tailored content to play an essential role in the evolving ecosystem for AI-generated insights. 

To rewind the tape a bit, Bhargav Shivarthy started Pricing Culture in 2021 aiming to create the most comprehensive database of prices for collectible assets from baseball cards to Ferraris. The evolution of second markets for these assets made that possible.

Funded by the venture capital firm Social Leverage, we built out databases and created the first reliable sets of indices for collectible assets. We began to market the data to investors and other companies looking to measure the performance of alternative assets. 

Three years into the process he realized that the company was missing an opportunity to make the data more accessible to a wider audience. By using generative AI, it would be possible to create news-style articles about collectibles and sell the content to publishers such as Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance.

Bhargav brought me on board as a co-founder to help build out the editorial capability. I had spent three decades at Bloomberg, first in the editorial group and then later as Global Head of News Product. 

We realized that our core competency had evolved from just collecting data to making it available by transforming it into text. Moreover, those written articles could serve both people and machines. As many have noted, the real audience for content in the future will be LLMs. 

We now see ourselves as a “digital printing press,” able to translate a plethora of data, especially arcane or private time series, into text narratives. Earlier this year we partnered with Skyfire and Carbon Arc, two startups that facilitate the sale of alternative data.

We are starting 2025 with a large and growing arsenal of data sets with which to create content, including everything from stock market feeds, sports betting numbers, weather data and real-estate, immigration, crypto, venture capital and hedge funds information. 

We are grateful for all the team’s hard work to build the systems we needed to provide customers with valuable insights. We expect to have more exciting announcements in the first quarter. 

If you want to learn more DM me for more information.