It was announced this week that August Capital would lead a $5.4M round A round in Canadian based Quandl to further the company’s growth of their web-based platform for financial and economic databases.
Currently hosting over 10 million financial and economic datasets on a single easy-to-use website, Quandl provides a web-based platform that users can take advantage of in order to access financial market data, energy and shipping data, economic and demographic data, and more. The data on Quandl’s site can be downloaded in nearly any format, or accessed through API, libraries for Excel, R, Python, Matlab and other tools.
“Our goal is to make it ever easier to find and use data,” says Quandl’s co-founder and chief data officer Abraham Thomas. “The current generation of data analysts is no longer satisfied with one-size-fits-all technology and draconian restrictions on use; they want the freedom to work on the data they need with the tools they choose. We make that happen.”
Getting noticed
Whatever Quandl’s up to, it’s certainly getting them noticed. August Capital’s has invested in over 75 companies across the technology spectrum, representing billions in capitalization, but this will be their first investment in a Canadian based startup.
Founded in 1995 by two seasoned veterans of the venture capital industry, Dave Marquardt and John Johnston, August Capital invests in companies differentiated by technical innovation and entrepreneurial excellence. The company is based out of Menlo Park California, and is fueled by eight investment professions—Marquardt, Johnston, Andy Rappaport, David Hornik, Vivek Mehra, Howard Hartenbaum, Eric Carlborg and Tripp Jones—who manage $1.3 billion in funds.
“Quandl is transformational. We think this platform will become fundamental internet infrastructure,” says Tripp Jones, partner at August Capital. “Quandl’s founders understand what data professionals need, and they have built precisely that. As a result, Quandl is already the most successful data platform of its kind ever.”
