Eagle Alpha, a start-up that mines social media and the web for market-related information, is expanding with backing from a handful of individual investors.
The company, which is based in Dublin with operations in New York and London, is expected to announce on Friday that it has raised $1.5 million from a group of current and former senior executives at banks and hedge funds. The money will help the start-up compete in a field that is becoming increasingly crowded.
Emmett Kilduff, the founder and chief executive, is hoping that the new investors will open doors for the young company.
“We didn’t want money for money’s sake,†he said in an interview on Thursday. “I wanted checks from people who were connected on Wall Street or the City of London.â€
While Mr. Kilduff said his company is taking on 13 new investors, whom he described as senior figures in finance, he agreed to disclose the name of only one, Guglielmo Sartori di Borgoricco, the former head of distribution at Barclays. Mr. Kilduff also declined to reveal his start-up’s valuation.
Mr. Sartori di Borgoricco left Barclays in 2012 as part of an overhaul of the investment bank. He joined the bank in 2004 from Credit Suisse and was promoted to the executive committee in 2008 after the merger with part of Lehman Brothers.
“Having worked in finance for 25 years,†Mr. Sartori di Borgoricco said in a statement, “I believe Eagle Alpha has developed a model which delivers significant competitive advantage to its clients in a way we’ve never seen before.â€
As more companies and investors use Twitter and other sites to release important information, market participants are trying to figure out how to sift through the noise and find useful insights on social media. One company, Social Market Analytics, is working with the New York Stock Exchange to give investors a window into how particular stocks are being discussed on Twitter. Others, including Dataminr and DataSift, buy data directly from Twitter and sell their analysis to clients.
Eagle Alpha, which sells its information products to hedge funds and investment banks, says it differs from its rivals by relying on people, in addition to technology, to curate the Internet. Using solely algorithms is “probably a higher margin approach but not the right approach,†Mr. Kilduff said.
Mr. Kilduff, 37, comes from the world of investment banking in London, having worked in equity capital markets at Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. He left Morgan Stanley in 2012 and started Eagle Alpha that year.
The company currently offers three different products. One, Global Macro, intended to appeal to hedge funds, scours the web for relevant content and includes a read-only Twitter feed of 100 tweets a day. Another, Social Sonar, offers a more robust interaction with Twitter, identifying important users of the service and pointing clients to interesting tweets.
In connection to the latest financing, the company hired a small sales force in January, with two employees in London and two in New York. Mr. Kilduff says the company now has 16 full-time employees.
