Like many teenage boys, Christopher Kardatzke and his twin brother James were into fantasy sports. More uniquely, they were fascinated with the statistics involved and spent high school study hall sessions independently developing a machine learning project to predict college football games.
"I think the model that we trained did better than human predictions by quite a bit," Kardatzke said.
When they turned 18, the Kardatzke brothers opened investment accounts and found that their interest in statistics translated to the financial world.
After learning about how hedge funds use alternative data — information not found on financial statements — to inform investment decisions and realizing that the information wasn't easily available online, they began working on what is now Quiver Quantitative Inc., an alternative data platform for retail investors.
"Our goal is to really kind of level the playing field between Main Street and Wall Street (investors)," Kardatzke said.
The twins began seriously working on the project in early 2019 and formally launched it in February 2020, with James taking the CEO title and Christoper taking on the chief technology officer role. (James was featured on the 2020 Inno Under 25 list.)
Quiver Quantitative's platform features free dashboards with data ranging from stock trading activity among U.S. Congressmen to Reddit discussion topics. The data is generally publicly available but "messy," Kardatzke said. Quiver automatically collects various forms of alternative data, visualizes it and adds analysis to give users additional insights.
"The idea is that you're trying to take some data that's not directly related to finance and find a way to tie it into finance and use it to predict something to gain an edge over the market," Kardatzke said.
The company primarily makes money by distributing its application programming interface (API) to enterprises, allowing them to automatically display Quiver Quantitative data on their sites, Kardatzke said.
After a few viral posts increased traffic to the site, the Quiver co-founders raised a $100,000 pre-seed funding round followed by a $525,000 seed round led by Wisconsin venture firm Idea Fund of La Crosse.
More than 85,000 registered individual investors and dozens of investment funds and enterprises use the platform, according to Kardatzke. The company recently rolled out a mobile app and is working on expanding its enterprise partnerships. The team has six full-time employees, including Christopher and James.
- Title: Co-founder, chief technology officer
- Company: Quiver Quantitative Inc.
- Age: 21
- Education: Bachelor's degree in statistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Hometown: Spring Green
- Resides: Madison
- Hobbies: Playing soccer and piano
