When not moonlighting at Chaotic Flow and Cloud Ave, I’ve been toiling away at Xignite for the better part of the last three years, and I’m happy to announce that the company has successfully closed $10 million in B round funding. The round was led by of Starvest Partners‘ Deborah Farrington who is #77 on the Forbes Midas List and was the lead VC for Netsuite, and John L. “Launny†Steffens, former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch. Previous investors Altos Ventures, Startup Capital Ventures and Peter Caswell, CEO of Netbase and former CEO of Advent Software, also participated.
While most of the public Silicon Valley buzz in recent years has gone to B2C startups like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and the like, I believe we’re at the beginning of a B2B renaissance led by a prominent list of rapidly growing cloud plays like Xignite. B2C startups tend to happen very fast or not at all, and consumers will often forgive their growing pains, even if they’re posting the fail whale on a daily basis. Not so in B2B. B2B startups spend their A rounds very carefully to make sure their offerings are rock solid before they scale. When I joined back in 2008, Xignite had about 150 clients. Today it has more than 900 customers in 47 countries.
The Financial Market Data Cloud
Market data is the life blood of the financial markets and is essential to every financial technology from algorithmic trading to iPad portfolio apps. Unfortunately, every year the financial markets create more of it. A lot more. In fact, the amount of data spewed off by financial markets has increased 10,000% in just the last 5 years. Plus, redistributing that data globally is getting harder with the increasing number of applications, particularly mobile apps. Xignite relieves that burden by pushing all that big data and associated infrastructure to to the cloud. The Xignite market data cloud platform transforms financial market data infrastructure into a utility just like electricity, allowing companies to build financial applications on top of enterprise-class cloud APIs. No fail whale allowed!!
Democratization of Financial Market Data
Before the cloud, only the largest firms could afford enterprise-class applications. Today, anyone can sign up for Salesforce.com and get the same application used by Dell, Prudential Financial and Sprint. Just as SaaS democratizes access to applications, the Xignite platform democratizes access to financial market data. This isn’t just great for the little guys. Big banks, hedge funds and money managers can significantly lower their costs by eliminating on-premise infrastructure. Exchanges and trading venues that put their market data onto the Xignite private-label cloud platform, such as NASDAQ OMX and CME Group, achieve immediate, global distribution through new online channels and superior market transparency as demanded by many of the new regulations resulting from the recent financial crisis.
The funding will be invested in sales and marketing to continue Xignite’s strong growth trajectory and to accelerate the addition of more data and more private label partners onto the Xignite platform. In particular, the company will be opening offices in New York City and Chicago and will be significantly expanding it’s Silicon Valley and China operations. So, Xignite is hiring!!
It isn’t just the little guys that are making their way to the cloud. Even Big Brother is taking up that initiative. Back in middle 2011, under the Obama administration, the Federal government started making cloud computing the default option whenever possible. Imagine all hospitals, military organizations and all government agencies making the shift to the cloud! That’s a major undertaking, which will even further create jobs for the cloud industries. These are great times to be in the industry of cloud computing.
[…] exploring the challenges and potential of harnessing big data. It’s estimated that the amount of data produced by financial markets has increased 10,000% in the last 5 […]
This will surely ignite the interest from those companies that have not adopt cloud computing yet.
Who are some of the thoughts leaders and bloggers that write about SaaS?…
1 Frank Traylor, software ceo I find excellent information in blogs. Take a look at: David Skok - http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ Joel York - https://chaotic-flow.com/ Kevin Dobbs - http://montclairadvisors.com/blog/ Scio Haut Tech - http://blog.sciode…
Wall Street and the whole “financial imperialists” are just too traditional in my opinion. But I really want to see what they can come up with when they realize that the clouds are the only way to go.
The cloud gives an even playing field and small-time investors don’t have to look at the big boys with envy.
I wish they’ll do this soon because I’m tired of bugging my neighbor with access to a Bloomberg terminal.
Congratulations are definitely in order! I’m happy to hear about your success too. It means that more businesses are becoming more aware of the many huge benefits of cloud computing, especially if cost-effectiveness and efficiency are being talked about.
Congratulations Joel! I know you have worked hard to grow Xignite. I look forward to more exciting news in the future!
The touch thing about an online business is that most people don’t understand online. Investors have a hard time investing in what they don’t understand. People can realize that a company serves a purpose for an industry and it does it from online. Where you start to lose people is when they realize that everything is done online and there is no customer face to face interaction.