The View from the Office.

I met up on Zoom with Joe O’Donnell, co-founder of Canary Data, a fintech startup that builds AI-powered software to help investors analyze opportunities.

Joe spent eight years at Tiger Global, where he ran the short portfolio. He and a friend started Canary three years ago. The original idea was to build a narrow risk-mitigation tool that would track recidivist fraudsters as a source of short opportunities. 

Initially the product let users screen a company for ties to bad actors. Then it expanded to review anomalies related to accounting, disclosures, insider sales and fundamentals. About a year ago, Joe realized he could build a generalized investment analyst.

This week, Canary announced series B funding from Tiger and Arena Holdings, which is run by Feroz Dewan, Joe’s former boss at Tiger. According to the Wall Street Journal, customers include Tiger and Flight Deck Capital; annual prices range from mid-five to mid-six figures.

Joe told me he’s trying to codify into software the hard-fought lessons he learned at Tiger. He said that on his first day at the firm Feroz Dewan handed him 10 investment-committee presentations. Every one was better than anything Joe had ever done. He realized the bar was high. 

Joe argues that most AI fintech products aim to cut costs by saving time. Canary is focused on improving returns by sharpening judgement. He said: returns come from good judgement not the speed of looking at ideas. 

The flagship product is called SuperAnalyst. It generates questions, builds research plans and generates answers using custom AI models, public data and alternative data such as credit card or web traffic data. 

To generate trade ideas, Canary built an AI screening tool and has begun releasing AI idea generation agents, the first of which is named Stanley – named after the legendary hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller – that focuses on cyclical longs and shorts.

Canary is delivered via APIs, Web interface and now, MCPs. The future goal is to build out custom analysts for funds so firms can import their own data and customize the “personality”, i.e. focus on longer or shorter time frames with more optimistic or skeptical outlooks. 

Joe lives in California but jokes that he works West Coast, East Coast, and sometimes European hours.

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