DGAP-News: Kensho /
Kensho Rings the Closing Bell to Celebrate Relationship With NASDAQ
OMX FinQloud and Securing $10 Million in Seed Financing to Build
'Warren,' an Intelligent Market Research Assistant That Can Answer
Complex Financial Questions Posed in Nat
22.01.2014 / 14:35
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System Currently Can Answer a Million Distinct Types of Questions About the
Impact of Global Events on Asset Prices, Based on Natural Language Queries
NEW YORK, 2014-01-22 14:35 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Kensho, a pioneer in cloud-based intelligent computer systems capable of
answering complex financial and market research questions posed in natural
language, today announced that it has completed the first phase of development
of 'Warren,' the company's groundbreaking virtual market research assistant,
and that it has secured $10 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, NEA,
Accel Partners, Google Ventures, Devonshire Investors (the private equity arm
affiliated with Fidelity Investments), and other VCs.
Kensho designed Warren to shorten traditional investment research cycles from
days to minutes. The system was built by several veteran software engineers
from Google Inc. and Apple Inc., including one of the original engineers on the
first iPhone team. Warren can currently answer a million distinct types of
natural language questions about the impact of global events on asset prices,
such as, 'What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades
above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle
East?'
Warren is also the first professional-grade financial research and analytics
platform built completely on NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, a secure cloud computing
platform designed exclusively for the financial services sector.
Daniel Nadler, CEO of Kensho, commented: 'If you look at what Apple is doing
with 'Siri,' what IBM is doing with 'Watson,' and what Google is doing with
'Now,' it is clear that the most powerful technology companies are investing
immense resources to make virtual intelligent assistants ubiquitous before the
end of the decade. Until now, we haven't seen systems optimized for finance--one
of the largest industries in the world. Kensho is dedicated to the idea that
communicating in natural language with intelligent computer systems which serve
as virtual personal assistants will form the leading edge of global innovation
over the next half-decade, and will transform not just the consumer space, but
industries from medicine and finance to energy and defense as well. We are
delighted to receive continued support from so many premier venture capital
firms and investors, and this funding will significantly expand our capacity to
support a growing number of the best and most experienced engineers in the
world in their development of Warren.'
Nadler added, 'We are delighted and to work closely with like-minded firms such
as NASDAQ OMX, which has provided critical operational support to our
development of Warren.'
In honor of the funding announcement, as well as Kensho's deep relationship
with NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, Kensho, Inc. will visit the NASDAQ MarketSite in
Times Square to ring the Closing Bell today.
'Building a virtual market research assistant who you can talk investment ideas
over with, and to whom you can express complicated, multi-conditional questions
that draw on both structured and unstructured data (from the history of all
asset prices to encyclopedias of global events) constitutes one of the most
significant engineering challenges in the history of financial technology'
Nadler said. 'It will require that an intelligent computer system read millions
of pages of natural language documents and have total recall of petabytes of
financial data, analyzing the cross-implications in a matter of seconds.
Computing these massive datasets in near real-time, and performing split-second
investment analysis by searching for correlations between unstructured and
structured data is extremely computationally intensive, and will require
sophisticated distributed computing environments. In overcoming this colossal
technical challenge we are pleased to continue our deep relationship with
NASDAQ OMX FinQloud, which augments our cloud-computing infrastructure with the
additional financial technology necessary to meet the very specific security
and regulatory obligations of financial services.'
'NASDAQ OMX FinQloud offers a platform for innovation and an ecosystem for
financial services community using cloud technology,' said Julia Sears,
Associate Vice President of FinQloud at NASDAQ OMX. 'We are pleased to host
Kensh? as our relationship enables FinQloud to serve not only as the financial
technology infrastructure but also as a destination where analytics may be
provided seamlessly to investors.'
About Kensho
Kensho is bringing the intelligent assistant revolution to finance with
user-friendly interactive research environments that combine cloud computing
with graphical user interfaces and natural language querying capabilities,
allowing financial professionals to perform sophisticated empirical analyses in
a fraction of the time spent by institutional research teams today, and without
writing code. The Kensho team is made up of world-class software engineers who
came to Kensho from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. (including one of the original
engineers on the first iPhone team), as well as Wall Street veterans, PhD
physicists, and economists.
For more information please visit: www.kensho.com.
NDAQG
Kensho Contact:
Ian Brady
press@kensho.com
News Source: NASDAQ OMX
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Language: English
Company: Kensho
United States
ISIN: US9902971111
End of News DGAP News-Service
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249124 22.01.2014
DGAP-News: Kensho Rings the Closing Bell to Celebrate Relationship With NASDAQ OMX FinQloud and Securing $10 Million in Seed Financing to Build 'Warren,' an Intelligent Market Research Assistant That Can Answer Complex Financial Questions Posed in Nat
| Source: EQS Group AG