Kilduff’s Eagle Alpha raises $1.5m to mine social media

Eagle Alpha, a Dublin headquartered start-up that analyses social media for stockbrokers, hedge funds and other investors, has raised $1.5 million (€1.1 million) in angel funding.

The company is led by former investment banker Emmett Kilduff, who previously worked with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, and celebrates its first birthday today.

Mr Kilduff’s father Tony, a veteran technology investor who previously sold banking software business Kindle, is also a director of the firm.

Mr Kilduff said Eagle Alpha was backed by 13 angel investors from the hedge fund, investment and technology sectors. Guglielmo Sartori di Borgoricco, the former head of distribution at Barclays, was one of them, he said, but he could not disclose the others yet.

“Our customers are in three buckets,” Mr Kilduff said. “Sell side firms, buy side firms and others, like hedge funds and inter-dealer brokers.” He said Eagle Alpha had partnered Datasift, which buys data from social networks.

Eagle Alpha, Mr Kilduff said, used its expertise to identify, sift, distil and aggregate large amounts of data generated by social networks to produce reports which investors used to inform their strategies.

“Some companies just use technology but we believe that doesn’t work alone and you need human curators too.”

For reasons of confidentiality, he could not disclose Eagle Alpha’s clients but he said they already included two of the world’s top 10 investment banks. Artemis, a £17 billion investment fund group, and Tradition, one of the world’s largest inter-dealer brokers, were both clients he said he was allowed to disclose.

Eagle Alpha plans to do a new fundraising in July, he added. “We would hope to raise more but I can’t say how much.”

The company was winning clients on both the buy and sell side of trading because compliance rules meant traders were not allowed to use social media while working, he said. “We solve that problem by monitoring social media for them and identifying key trends.”

For example, if an individual tweeted that he wanted to buy a car, this was “meaningless” but if all data on this topic in, say, the United States, was analysed, this could produce a useful indicator.

Eagle Alpha employs 20 people and hoped to hire more, he said. It was attending start-ups jobs fare Dubstarts later this month.