The View from the Office.

I met up with Anthony Vinci, co-founder and CEO of Vico, a startup that produces forecasts of political, geopolitical and economic events, in midtown. We both had tea.

The idea behind Vico is to mine a wide array of public data and leverage AI to calculate probabilities that events will occur. 

Vico pulls data from about 150,000 sources ranging from news feeds, think-tank reports and government sites such as OFAC and Treasury. 

Vinci said the accuracy of Vico’s model can be as high as 70 to 80 percent depending on the topic.

The forecasts provide an alternative to more traditional methods to gauge the likelihood of an event, such as surveys or prediction markets.

Anthony started working in tech around 1999 and then became an intelligence officer and served in Iraq. 

He later served as the chief technology officer of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency where he helped introduce commercial data and AI and to automate analysis. 

In 2018, he joined Bridgewater Associates and then moved to Cerberus Capital under Steve Feinberg. 

He co-founded Vico with Lyndon Oh, an economist who holds a PhD and previously worked at Google. Oh is the chief technology officer. 

The two originally considered using the forecasting models they built to launch a hedge fund that traded on event risk. But they decided to pivot to build a technology company. 

Vico’s forecasts went live on the Bloomberg terminal around the start of the year. There are about 150 tickers with probabilities and time-series data. Anthony said they worked with my former Bloombeg colleague Michael McDonough to make that happen. 

The company has also launched three new indexes: US hard power, tokenization and deglobalization. Vinci describes the goal as an MSCI for event risk. The indexes are available on the web site and Bloomberg. 

The company is also building products that assess FDA actions, DOJ lawsuits and policy changes across the pharmaceutical industry.

Vico sells to buy-side traders, sell-side analysts, insurers and government clients. Vinci said the most client interest is in big events, political forecasts and regulatory action. 

You can connect with Anthony via LinkedIn or the website or DM me for a warm intro.