Continuous packaging platform Cloudsmith and financial market analytics provider Quant Insight have both enjoyed a juicy funding boost this week.
It’s a tale of two cities as Cloudsmith is based in Belfast and bagged $15 million (£11 million), while Quant Insight is in London and scooped up $10 million (£7.3 million) funding.
Stick Around Cloudsmith
For Cloudsmith the funding comes via its recent Series A round. This was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Shasta, Sorenson, Amaranthine, Leadout Capital, and previous investors Frontline, MMC and Techstart. According to Crunchbase, Cloudsmith has raised a total of £13.2 million in funding over three rounds.
The firm was founded in 2016 and provides cloud-native package management for software engineers and their organisations.
With its platform, customers can track and control the distribution of any software asset.
Cloudsmith explains: “CI/CD and DevOps are part of modern software supply chains, but a genuinely holistic view from source to delivery is required. A solution that powers global infrastructure at scale and provides criticality of performance, observability and isolation. A logistics-based smart CDN that offers controls and insights; a software-aware Package Distribution Network (PDN).”
In a viewpoint that sticks in the mind, it calls continuous packaging “the glue between CI and CD in the supply chain”.
Cloudsmith offers support for 24+ formats, 225 PoPs, 24/7 engineer-driven support, and a partner ecosystem with tools like Buildkite, HashiCorp, Snyk and CircleCI.
The new funds will be used to grow the Cloudsmith team (it has 20 employees listed on LinkedIn), deliver on its product roadmap and expand into unnamed international markets.
All Qi on the London Front
Quant Insight (Qi) deems its funding a major scale up after four years of research and development – and says the funding stems from three investment rounds.
Mahmood Noorani, Qi’s co-founder and CEO, comments: “For too long the investment world has relied on a mixture of subjective research, educated guesses and an abundance of data that has made accurate decision-making impossible.
“To tackle this endemic problem, we have combined advanced mathematics, data science, machine-learning, and decades of financial expertise to create a fully-automated financial market brain, RETINA, that scans markets globally, intraday, ingesting millions of data points daily on high frequency macro information, to identify high probability opportunities and deliver signals in real time.”
RETINA reduces these data points into two to five essential daily insights and is being used by investment banks, hedge funds and asset managers, including Alan Howard of Brevan Howard.
The company, which was established in 2014, is not just financial market analytics as it also offers trading insights.
Qi has offices in London, New York and Limassol (Cyprus), and clients with total assets under management (AUM) of over $2.5 trillion (£1.8 trillion) incorporating Qi’s analytics in their investment process.
The firm is led by macro hedge fund portfolio managers and academics in machine learning and signal extraction from Cambridge, Harvard and Princeton, in addition to data engineers.
Qi’s investors also include Alan Howard and JP Stein, with additional investors including financial market professionals, the ex-CEO of a major European investment bank, and the chairman of a top three US investment bank. I guess the data doesn’t stretch to mentioning any specific names.
With retail traders on its mind, Qi is developing an API, which allows them to partner with online brokers and messaging platforms, so retail investors get access to analytical tools and trading signals that are being used by institutional investors.