A fledgling fintech startup is rolling out the latest step toward challenging the big boys in investment research. The firm is launching a free version of a product that will open up the tooling and data in its arsenal to a broader audience.

It is the brainchild of a software engineer, Didier Lopes, who in 2021 launched the Python-based platform as a channel through which amateur investors and enthusiasts can conduct research into investments using other datasets for free through a command-line interface. The company further raised seed funding worth $8.5 million from OSS Capital, among angel investors including Ram Shriram, an early backer for Google.

While the community-based, open-source project has attracted some 50,000 users, OpenBB has also been working on an enterprise variant called Terminal Pro. The paid version offers teams access to an interface; pre-built database integrations; an Excel add-in; and various security and support bolt-ons that would be attractive to bigger businesses.

OpenBB claims some big-name customers that include shipping and logistics company Pangaea Logistics Solutions and an unnamed investment firm, which Lopes says has $6.4 billion in assets under management.

But now OpenBB is after the kind of customers who might otherwise be swayed to look at Bloomberg Terminal or products from upstarts like AI market intelligence startup AlphaSense, which raised at a $4 billion valuation in June 2024.

Terminal velocity
The brand-new OpenBB Terminal is not the same as the old CLI-based OpenBB Terminal that the startup sunsets last March. It is a full-featured web application, although one that cuts away many of the premium features of Terminal Pro. Completely customizable, runs across any operating system or platform, and has access to an AI-enabled OpenBB copilot. Just like the earlier OpenBB Terminal, the brand-new web app comes free of charge.

OpenBB Terminal may represent some middle ground between the CLI-centricity of the open source project and the bells-and-whistles feature set of the enterprise product.

"There was a big disconnect between the open-source community that we built and the enterprise offering, because the enterprise product wasn't accessible to everyone," Lopes told TechCrunch in an interview.

OpenBB Terminal is just one single endpoint through which to access financial information drawn from some 100 data sources covering equity, options, forex, the macro economy, and lots more. And you can incorporate all your new data into the mix, too, as this community has previously contributed financial datasets like historical currency exchange rates and crypto pricing data. There are also a host of extensions and toolkits to further enhance what can be done in OpenBB — like an AI stock analysis agent.

While using one's own AI systems and large language models (LLMs), that may be particularly important for security and compliance use-cases. However, the OpenBB Copilot, being a "compound AI system", allows users to run natural-language queries about their data out of the box.

Lopes highlighted one particularly quirky use-case that demonstrated why a more flexible financial research platform might be something of interest to some firms:

In this case, the firm was a shipping company using OpenBB to connect their email accounts with a customized AI copilot, then asking it questions like "What vessels are currently near Rio de Janeiro?" or "What vessels are heading toward South Africa?"

But they are also looking at integrating other data to inform decisions around price.

They're using AI to scan all their e-mails-and, boy, is that a lot of unstructured data difficult to tease out Lopes said. "Their ultimate goal, however is that they could ask questions based on their e-mails but also base it on structured data, like oil price, so their copilot might be able to suggest the best pricing based on all of that data.

As with most community-driven products, OpenBB is effectively using OpenBB Terminal to reach out to people who might eventually end up driving signups for its premium enterprise incarnation.

If you look at companies like AlphaSense and others, they have really big sales departments, it's all very 'outbound,'" Lopes said. "We want to go totally the other way where we leverage product-led growth. We want to have analysts, researchers, funds, etc, using our product for free and bringing other people from their team onto it.".

OpenBB says it has a distributed team of 15 workers today and Lopes is eager to bring in a few more leaders — and he said he's made some offers to several with experience at some of the largest players in the financial research space.

"This hiring will probably eat more into our runway, so we are likely going to raise [more funding] in the near future," Lopes said.

The 'Bloomberg' factor
OpenBB has often been compared to Bloomberg Terminal since its inception, and it's hardly surprising to assume that the "BB" in its name is an allusion to its high-profile competitor. Not so, Lopes says:.

For context, Lopes stated that he was among the losers who bet on companies during the mid-pandemic meme stock mania when volatility in trading stocks broke loose over social media circles and invested in such firms. During such periods, stocks from publicly traded companies, for example, Gamestop and BlackBerry, shoot fast to the stratosphere before they tumble into the nothingness of space. And so Lopes founded GameStonk Terminal early in 2021 to aggregate financial data relating to publicly traded companies and their peers, together with relevant SEC filings, earnings reports, and even market sentiment as expressed on social networks such as Reddit and Twitter.

A profile piece in Vice magazine at the time described GameStonk Terminal as the "DIY meme stock version of Bloomberg Terminal."

While Bloomberg Terminal is indispensable to many, and has become something of a standard in the financial industry, it runs to the tune of $25,000 per user a year. GameStonk Terminal was free, and early traction made Lopes quit his engineering job to work full-time on GameStonk. This summer, the service rebranded as OpenBB in early 2022 "to show that we were serious about the company," as Lopes wrote at the time, raising $8.5 million in seed funding.

"When we raised our seed round as an open-source platform — with a command-line interface offering financial data integration — it was pretty easy for folks to characterize us as some sort of 'open source Bloomberg,' Lopes said. "The 'BB' in our name came from the BlackBerry ticker, where both my co-founder and I were losing money in the stock market."

While comparisons are understandable, OpenBB isn't a drop-in alternative to Bloomberg Terminal for purely logical reasons: the startup just can't compete with the scale and magnitude of the better-established product.

"If you're looking to us as a replacement for Bloomberg Terminal, that doesn't really work because they have so much data," Lopes said. "There's no other company in the world that has as much data as Bloomberg."

Moreover, Bloomberg Terminal comes pre-populated with in-built chat functionality through which users can converse with each other real-time adding strength to the "flywheel" effect it could be likened to a kind of traditional social network. This would be something that OpenBB could easily emulate and has been constructed in such a fashion that could make it easy enough for the company to welcome messaging in the future, as each user on its OpenBB Hub already has its unique profile and username.

"If we decided to have chat, we can tap into those profiles and usernames, and it wouldn't be a big stretch from there," Lopes said. "But it's not yet on the roadmap."

On the other hand, OpenBB empowers users to build out their own front-end interface, add features and extensions on top of the open-source product and customize 'til the cows come home.

While this does emphasize how the two products ultimately serve different purposes, even if they do overlap, there could still be legal headwinds ahead for OpenBB.

It's been nearly 18 months since rebranding, and OpenBB only recently filed to trademark its name, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just publishing the application to initiate a 30-day window in which the public can voice opposition to granting the trademark. In advance of this deadline, USPTO received a request for a 90-day extension, which it granted — but what was most intriguing was that the request came from Bloomberg.

Lopes said he hasn't heard anything straight from Bloomberg about a possible fight over the trademark, adding that he's not worried because the "BB" in his company name doesn't have anything to do with Bloomberg anyway.
"If we were using 'BBG,' which is what people normally use as an abbreviation for Bloomberg, we'd understand," Lopes said. "But 'BB' is a big stretch."

So if it's not trying to be the 'open source alternative to Bloomberg', what IS it trying to be?,,

"Our top-line goal is to be the best AI-powered research and analytics workspace, building as much open source as possible," Lopes said.