Jianwei Data (见微数据), an AI-powered financial information service provider, is tapping into the fintech market by providing financial search services. The company announced that it has closed a pre-A round co-led by Baidu Ventures (百度风投) and Next Capital (嘉程资本).
The financing will be used mainly for technological development.
Financial intermediaries including investment banks, law firms and auditing service providers often need to sift through massive published materials and documents for useful information which could be an arduous and time-consuming process, said LU Feifei, CEO of Jianwei Data. The company hopes to analyze these unstructured public data (including company announcements and laws and regulations) and make them accessible through search functions for its clients so that they can obtain from the unstructured data the exact information and statistics they need.
Specifically, Jianwei Data uses vision and natural language processing technologies to extract information and statistics from the various published documents it rounds up from different sectors of the stock market and reorganizes them into multi-level/dimensional structured datasets that span a wide range of sectors.
On top of these datasets, Jianwei Data built a dedicated search engine for financial documents using an open-source framework, which it offers to clients in the form of SaaS solutions and is working continuously to boost the search accuracy and efficiency in hopes of delivering a better user experience. The SaaS product targets primarily capital market practitioners and has currently been used by clients from investment banks, law firms and funds, providing tens of millions of times for searches, information collection and push message services.
However the cloud-based SaaS product may allow the company to quickly expand its business, it provides no guarantee for user stickiness or revenue. That’s why Jianwei Data plans to put its focus on deploying on-premise solutions for institutional clients. This will give it access to clients’ internal data, which it can process together with external public data and include in search results. It will also pave the way for Jianwei Data to continuously expand its product line and functional modules based on clients’ business procedures and demands.
There are thousands of document-intensive financial institutions across China, noted LU, who estimated the market to be worth over 10 billion yuan (approx. US$1.5 billion). Jianwei Data expects to enter the market by targeting financial intermediaries and eventually provide comprehensive capital market information solutions customized for different clients.
Jianwei Data has a team of 20 people at present. Its founder and CEO LU Feifei is a certified fund specialist and has years of experience in data analysis and quantitative trading of share options. Co-founder and CTO DU Ning has previously worked at a law firm and the NASDAQ-listed big data company Gridsum (国双科技).
