With experience in stock trading, Ramsey Shaffer and Sam Cartford figured there was a better way to track conversations about the market to more accurately predict outcomes, without needing to endlessly scroll social media sites.
So, they founded Babbl, a fintech startup with a platform that tracks stock market news and trends. The St. Cloud-based company has now opened an office in Minneapolis, coinciding with the platform’s public launch earlier this year.
Babbl, one of The Beta Group’s recent accelerator program graduates, moved into an office it's sharing with another startup in the Twin Ignition Startup Garage, a coworking and incubator space in the Sheridan neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis, in early March.
The company also made its first employee hire, which accompanies the move as well as the January launch of the beta version of the startup’s platform for free.
The recent growth sets the foundation for Babbl’s plans to scale, including through closing a pre-seed round, making additional hires and building a second, more complete version of the platform in the coming weeks and months, CEO Shaffer said.
Founded in mid-2020 by Shaffer and chief technology officer Cartford, Babbl offers a free stock market news-monitoring website that tracks news, attitudes and trends in conversation. The company looks to “revolutionize the way retail investors access and consume financial news through the use of AI-based natural language monitoring technology,” the company says.
“Everywhere people are talking about stocks online; we gather all that information up, and then we do some analysis and tell people what's happening at a bird's eye view,” Shaffer said.
The full platform will launch incrementally over the next 12 months, and will include added features like financial topic modeling, news event detection and advanced analysis options. In the next six months, the company also plans to hire a handful of new team members, either on a contractual or full-time employment basis, Shaffer said.
The company's new Minneapolis office at the Twin Ignition Startup Garage will be time-shared with ProsperStack, Shaffer said, which is a low-code, software-as-a-service provider for subscription-based businesses that was on Minne Inno’s 2023 Startups to Watch.
The Startup Garage has been a pillar of the startup community, housing both high-growth startups and startup-support organizations, since opening in 2020. That includes companies like TurnSignl and Carbon Origins, as well as organizations like pre-seed investment firm Groove Capital and nonprofit Beta.
Often hitting capacity, the Startup Garage has seven offices where companies can set up a home base, Minne Inno previously reported.
Babbl, which is working to finalize a name change in the coming weeks, has a goal to hit $50,000 in monthly revenue by the end of this year, which is attainable with its current trajectory plans, Shaffer said, adding that it's also working to close a pre-seed round of $500,000.
