A Year-end Reflection and Looking Ahead at 2019

As the year 2018 coming to an end, it is time to reflect on our journey and the changes we’ve seen in both our organization and the industry.

Since 2016, Kavout has been leading the frontier of technology innovation in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for financial services. We do that by helping customers gain a competitive advantage and save cost in investing and asset management.

We celebrate 2018 with a growing number of customers and strategic partners including enterprise financial institutions with revenue or market cap ranging from $200M to $1B, world’s leading hedge funds with asset under management in the range of $100M to $5B, and financial media and technology firms reaching monthly active users greater than $22M.

In part, bringing on a few core management teams to lead product, engineering, sales, and marketing were proved to be the right strategy, along with increased investment in research, product development, and go-to-market efforts.

But really the acknowledgment goes to every single one of our 30 and growing, employees at Kavout. We may be small, yet the collective force is mighty as we roll up our sleeves, innovate and iterate, and collaborate across our offices in Seattle, New York, Beijing, and Shanghai.

As our company evolves and grows, we see technology as the main driver for the next financial industry revolution.

Gartner predicts that in the next five years, artificial intelligence and machine learning will increasingly become the foundational components of all applications, services and things around us.

Top Wall Street investment institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and Bridgewater are actively embracing change, integrating machine learning and big data technologies into investment strategies and processes.

Next-generation machine learning based algorithms are being introduced to the market as we speak. These algorithms play a greater role today in data processing, signal mining, the discovery of winning investment strategies, and quantitative trading, helping brokers, wealth management, and fund management companies customize, hedge, and execute transactions.

If the data is akin to oil in the 21st century, then the capital market data is already a huge oil field.

To play in the big data space is to be, one willing to and two knowing how-to, work with voluminous, unstructured and unconventional data that was either inaccessible before, or not possible to handle using outdated methods. A considerable amount of investment has been made to discover factors and signals from non-fundamental data sets.

Relying on traditional analysis to find Alpha is a losing proposition. Diversified intelligent data processing, semantic text analysis, and machine learning technologies will bring new growth opportunities to asset allocation and management.

Kavout has followed the principle of data-first, and value creation with advanced algorithms, models and computing power.

As we stepping into 2019, we plan on introducing new services and solutions in areas of data processing and analytics, expanding K Score to cover all the major global equity markets, opening up models and algorithms to customers and partners as platform or software services, just to name a few.

We look forward to providing more and better products and services to our existing customers, and the opportunity to earn your business if you’re interested in learning more or partnering with us.

Please drop in from time to time and check on our progress.

Happy New Year from the Kavout team!