CityFALCON

Idea

Introduction

In finance, data is money. Quality, curated, and structured data is a lot of money.

CityFALCON, a fintech startup, transforms unstructured financial content into structured data using natural language processing (NLP) and will soon launch personalisation of data for users and clients using machine learning. We also allow data consumption by voice and chatbot.

Bytedance started off with a similar news aggregation service Toutiao in China and is now reportedly worth $75bn. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09...

Our B2B and B2B2C clients include BNP Paribas, Raiffeisen Bank, IEX Stock Exchange and several fintech companies. See an example of our news API integration at https://bravos.co/goog

In the first seven months of 2018-19, the company has generated £71K in revenue compared to £25K for the financial year 2017-18. The monthly revenue has grown from £7K in April 2018 to £15K in November 2018*. We have already signed deals for 2018-19 with a total revenue value of >£130k and have a total sales pipeline of >£500K.

*Source: unaudited management accounts

We will launch our 'premium' Spotify-like subscription for prosumers in 2019 which will provide non-public and paywalled content for a fixed monthly fee. Our premium content partners include Twitter and Bloomberg, and we are in discussions with several others.

Here is a how we leverage NLP to serve relevant content and remove the noise:

Intended impact

Lacking access to quality data and real-time news sources, our founder built the first version of the product from his bedroom to solve his own data problem while investing in the stock markets. This need grew into a passion and blossomed into CityFALCON.

Traditional financial news feeds and systems are expensive, provide poor user experience and are based on legacy technologies. They rely on manual curation in contact centres and cover limited social media activity. While there are several solutions for rich traders and investors, some audiences are underserved. These include wealth managers, long-term investors, fintech companies, and knowledge management teams. Yahoo Finance which is more than a decade old is the number one Finance site and records 150m visits a month.

While we currently focus on news, tweets, and research in 30+ languages, we will soon add private and public company filings, price and fundamental data, and insights from all the aggregated structured data. We are also working with a bank to manage their internal research.

Our key clients BNP Paribas and Raiffeisen Bank explain their FinTech strategy and why they are working with us:

How far are we willing to go to support the business? Our founder jumped into an ice hole in the frozen Baltic Sea:

Substantial accomplishments to date

We are ranked #1 or #2 on Google for our B2B keywords 'financial news API'. For 'business news API' keywords, we are on the first page of Google.

We've built scalable technologies that process millions of stories in real-time for different asset classes and topics.

Users can access our products on the web, and through Android and iOS apps. For enterprises, we provide an API to access our content and technology for monthly licensing fees or revenue share. We'll soon launch on the Symphony communications platform.

Voice technology - We are one of the few financial services company to offer a quality solution on devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Please note that these products are minimum viable products (MVP), and there is a long way for us to go. Here is our vision:

We've graduated from Microsoft Accelerator, Octopus Investments Accelerator, and Kickstart Accelerator and receive continued support.

We have received several awards and recognition: second at Twitter’s global start-up competition, won ‘The Next Big Idea in FinTech’ from Ontario, final ten at the Standard Bank Challenge, and final ten in EMEA at the UBS Competition. See all the awards and press here - https://www.cityfalcon.com/press.

In the physical realm, we manage London Value Investing Club (http://www.meetup.com/london-investing/) where we have 2.5K members with an average of 2 events per month.

Monetisation strategy

We already generate revenue, have a sales pipeline of over £500K.

We focus on 2 key streams of revenue:

1. B2B and B2B2C API licensing fees - Businesses pay us a monthly recurring fee or revenue share for licensing our curated content and tech. Analysts expect this market to be worth £15bn+.

2. Premium monthly subscription - We'll launch a premium subscription with non-public and paywalled content for a seamless consumption experience. Imagine a Spotify for financial news. Our focus is on prosumers who have the ability and willingness to pay. Businesses can also provide access to their employees via a single sign-on.

Other revenue opportunities include licensing of our NLP technology, affiliate revenue from brokers and financial product providers, and fees for historical structured data.

Use of proceeds

We remain a lean fintech organisation and our net monthly cash burn is only £35-40K.

We'll use the money raised to:
1. Hire for senior management roles
2. Expand our NLP capabilities – hire data scientists, developers, native speakers
3. Onboard premium non-public content
4. Enhance cloud infrastructure for low latency delivery globally
5. Market our premium subscription

Our basis of valuation is explained in detail here:
https://www.cityfalcon.com/blog/the-startup-jou...

Also, we commit the following to our investors:
* Monthly updates by the 10th of next month
* Proper cash flow management
* Stay lean
* Break even and become self-sustainable
* Contribute significantly to the UK and the world
* Complete transparency
Read more https://www.cityfalcon.com/blog/the-startup-jou...