Gregory Ugwi and Justin Zhen, while working on the wall street (Justin worked at the Hedge Fund and Gregory worked at the Goldman Sachs), spent most of their time building financial models. They thought “there had to be a better application than the Excel spreadsheet as well as a better approach to collaboration than emailing massive files among analysts.” Greg and Justin decided to find a solution to their “pain points” and thus founded Thinknum, a platform for financial analysis.
Thinknum allows investors to access the web’s financial knowledge, providing analytical tools and alternative data to generate insights on granular operating business drivers. According to Justin, in a networked world, the valuation of financial assets works very differently “due to the amount of data, computing power, and people found on the web.” Thinknum aims to be a platform for this process of valuation. Thinknum’s target audiences are professional analysts and investors whose job is the valuation of financial assets.
When they started, the biggest challenge for Greg and Justin was to tell people what they were building. Eventually, when Jason Voss of the CFA institute wrote about them, it was their “very first big break”. The founders of Thinknum seem to be confident of the huge scope for expansion. “There are a million people who analyze financial markets professionally and pay for software to support their work.” says Justin. He adds, ” Yahoo finance has about 37 million active users, so there is larger universe of non-professionals who are passionate about finance. We will continue to build tools and aggregate data that our users ask for.”
Greg and Justin use the subscription model to monetize Thinknum. “The platform is free for users who keep their content public, and we charge $200 per user per month for institutional clients to keep private workspaces and access alternative datasets.” Justin tells us.
Please visit https://www.thinknum.com/ for more information.
