The View from the Office.

I met up with Kirk McKeown, the founder of Carbon Arc, at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of 5th Avenue and 31st Street in Manhattan. Kirk had the jelly donut and an iced coffee. I had the old fashioned and a cappuccino. 

Kirk co-founded Carbon Arc five years ago after running proprietary research at Point72, the hedge fund founded by Mets owner Steve Cohen. Last year, the firm announced it had raised $56 million in venture funding led by Liberty City Ventures. 

Carbon Arc provides clients with access to more than 200 alternative data sources: everything from credit card spending to car registration numbers. Many are proprietary datasets that historically were available only to large hedge funds with deep budgets and legal teams.

Demand for access to that kind of data is increasing as companies see it as the raw material AI systems need to produce accurate answers. 

Large language models including ChatGPT and Claude need clean, structured data to be useful. A new standard called MCP, or Model Context Protocol, lets those AI tools plug directly into outside data sources. Carbon Arc launched its MCP server on March 9 and is now connected inside Perplexity and OpenAI. Other integrations are imminent. 

The practical effect will be to reduce obstacles to connecting to outside data. A customer with a Claude subscription can now query Carbon Arc’s data through their AI assistant. No separate dataset licenses are required.

Flexibility is the other advantage. Data available via traditional financial information platforms such as Bloomberg are set up in precise but rigid timeseries. You might be able to chart how many Ford F-150s were sold, but can’t easily break that down by sub categories like the number sold in Florida, by month, or by dealer. That kind of analysis is possible using LLMs.

One of Kirk’s longer-term expectations is that data itself will become a financial asset as more and more recognize its value and take steps to structure and sell it. In the future they could carry it on their balance sheets the way they carry inventory or real estate. 

He drew an analogy to airline loyalty points. Delta carries those on its balance sheet as an intangible asset because there is an agreed framework for valuing them. At some point, data could be recorded as an asset, allowing companies to borrow against it.

Carbon Arc has 60 full-time employees and plans to hire more. The team is mostly remote. 

You can connect with Kirk via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.