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November 21, 2014

CNBC Looks to Scale Market Analytics

CNBC, the cable financial news channel, said this week it is joining forces with market analytics platform developer Kensho Technologies Inc. through a strategic investment and a content sharing agreement aimed at developing a new financial data analytics tool that adds another market ticker to the cable channel’s network feed.

Terms of the investment and a separate content sharing deal were not disclosed.

The deal is part of a strategic investment in Kensho by CNBC’s parent, NBCUniversal News Group. The deal agreement gives the financial news channel access to Kensho platform, which combines natural language search, visual interfaces and cloud computing to create new types of analytical tools.

The Kensho platform is billed as providing financial analysts with insights on “millions of permutations of complex financial questions.” It also uses massively parallel statistical computing and advances in unstructured data engineering, Kensho said.

NBCUniversal said it wants to use the Kensho platform to augment is current stock indices and its ubiquitous stock ticker as a way to speed the delivery of unique market content to its viewers.

CNBC debuted its Kensho Stats Box on Nov. 20. The cable channel said its journalists would use the Kensho platform to uncover market research and insights to give viewers “actionable, historical context around market moving events.”

The other end of the deal gives Kensho access to CNBC’s financial coverage that would be integrated into the analytics platform Kensho sells to financial institutions.

The partners said they have also agreed to collaborate on new market analytics products that would be targeted at “ordinary investors.” The first products are scheduled to be launched in 2015, the partners said.

Kensho, Cambridge, Mass., said its platform is tailored to answering complex financial question that can be posed in English and in real time. For example, CEO Daniel Nadler said, “If you wanted to ask a computer system, ‘What happens to U.S. defense stocks, how do U.S. defense stocks trade, after a North Korean nuclear milestone?’ there’s no kind of a system you can ask that using natural language. We’re trying to address that issue.”

The startup was founded in 2013 by Nadler and other researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its software engineers and data scientists have worked at Apple, Facebook and Google and the U.S. Federal Reserve. The company is backed by Google Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, New Enterprise Associates and others and raised $10 million in seed funding in January 2014.

Other clients include global banks and “several of the best performing hedge funds in history,” the company notes.

The startup bills itself as developing data analytics technologies that “bring transparency to markets” and “democratization of market analytics at scale.”

Nadler told the financial news channel that the startup is “trying to augment the tools that people have,” most of which are nearly 20 years old. “You’re trying to get people further along the line of data, you’re trying to surface data as quickly as you can using natural language. So the engineering challenge is building a natural-language interface that you can ask financial questions.”

The platform seeks to create “a statistical annotation of the world,” Nadler explained.

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