CityFALCON

Idea

Introduction

Note: CityFALCON has received two six-figure grants not included in the funded amount. See Key Information for more details.

In finance, data is money. Curated and structured data is a lot of money. We are the Spotify of financial content, including paywall-free content.

We transform unstructured financial content into structured data, generate analytics, extract insights, and deliver personalised data to users and clients.

BNP Paribas, IEX Group, and several fintech companies, including Seedrs and WiseAlpha, are clients, along with tens of thousands of end-users.

We’re disrupting the £23 bn market dominated by Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and Crunchbase with automation, long-tail coverage, and unrestricted access to our data via API and web at reasonable prices.

Bytedance started off with a similar news aggregation service Toutiao in China and is now reportedly worth $75bn.

Our share price has continued to climb as we have demonstrated product and revenue traction. The below graph is based on share prices paid by investors in each previous fundraise for the duration of the time the company has been in existence. Therefore, the figures refer to the past and past performance is not an indicator of future results. Investments may be EIS eligible, but tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and is subject to change.

Intended impact

In our view, many incumbents have been slow to react to the proliferation of AI, automation, APIs, and Big Data. We have seen that they are expensive, provide poor user experience (UX), and are based on inefficient legacy technologies, relying on manual curation. Free resources like Yahoo Finance and Google are popular but from our perspective, cannot offer deep insights, and they sell user data to advertisers.

High cost and poor UX leaves several audiences underserved. These include wealth managers, retail investors, fintech companies, knowledge management teams, and anyone else who needs quality financial content. CityFALCON users can monitor investments and perform pre-investment due diligence. Internal teams can manage business and market-related knowledge through watchlists and our API, including tracking competitors and business leads. Clients can even perform KYC and AML duties with company filings and by tracking changes in legislation or prominent cases.

The market is large and ripe for disruption:

CityFALCON features and insights coming in 2020 are content summarisations, price action explanations, spam and sentiment scoring, and alternative data, all sourced in 90+ languages.

Our key clients BNP Paribas and Seedrs explain their FinTech strategy and why they are working with us:

How far are we willing to go to support the business? Our founder jumped into an ice hole in the frozen Baltic Sea:

Substantial accomplishments to date

We have built a strong core team that have worked together for over four years, along with many newcomers:

Our API appears in the first few results on Google for the B2B keywords 'financial news API', and for 'business news API', we appear on the first page. Organic inclusion reduces outbound sales spend.

Our scalable technologies process millions of stories in real-time in 30+ languages, sourced from 3000+ publications, including paywall-free and non-public content from hundreds of Premium publications including New York Times, Economist, Washington Post, and Fitch. As a global company, other Premium publications include Xinhua News, Yonhap News, Moscow Times, and Hindustan Times, among many others:

We have built an enterprise API, a web and mobile platform, and voice solutions.

Single Sign-On, Symphony integration, and several other platforms are in the works for 2020.

Our filings service covers filings for public and private companies globally - LSE RNS filings, the US SEC, and companies houses from around the world. Read more on this feature: https://www.cityfalcon.com/blog/the-startup-jou...

Never again miss filings that could impact your investments or business, like Den Automation’s bankruptcy:

We have received two grants from Malta Enterprise and have partnered with the University of Malta to expand our NLP capabilities. We retain the intellectual property from the project. More in the Documents tab.

We’ve received awards and recognition and have graduated from many institutions and competitions:

See all the awards and press: https://www.cityfalcon.com/press.

For the community, we manage a social and educational Value Investing Club in 12 cities across Europe, counting nearly 4k members https://www.meetup.com/pro/value-investing/

Monetisation strategy

We currently focus on 2 key streams of revenue:

1. API licensing fees - Monthly recurring fee or revenue share for licensing our curated content and tech, which is either used internally or white-labelled for their own customers. BNP Paribas, Seedrs, IEX Group, and WiseAlpha are already using the API. See plans: https://www.cityfalcon.com/products/api/financi...

2. Premium subscriptions - low-cost plans that offer select non-public and paywall-free content from hundreds of publications (https://www.cityfalcon.com/help/articles/360034...), on-demand translation, and curated Tweets. Features to launch in 2020 include archival search, offline reading, and personal API access. Targets are retail and prosumer users. Single sign-on for business teams is slated for 2020 release. See plans: https://www.cityfalcon.com/pricing

Additional revenue opportunities for the future include fees for licensing of our NLP technology (e.g. content summarisation, sentiment scoring, entity detection) to manage and curate client internal content, historical structured data sets, specialised private company insights, pay-per-view options, and affiliate fees.

Use of proceeds

We remain lean with an annual net burn of under £400K in 2019, even with a team of ~40 employees, data licensing costs and processing and storage costs of tens of millions of datapoints.

Over 75% of the funds from this round will be earmarked for salaries and technology costs while the rest will be used for marketing and premium content. This money will also support the private capital requirement for the Malta R&D grant. See Documents for more information.

Our basis of valuation is explained in detail here: https://www.cityfalcon.com/blog/the-startup-jou...

Also, we commit the following to our investors: Monthly updates by the 10th of the month; proper cash flow management; staying lean; breaking even and become self-sustainable; complete transparency.

Perks

Certain additional rewards for early or large investments - more at https://www.cityfalcon.com/help/articles/360004...

1 Month Free Trial of Silver:

Coupon voucher code: Seedrs_2020
Valid until 31 March 2020.

To use the code:

1) Sign in or register at https://www.cityfalcon.com.
2) Go to https://www.cityfalcon.com/pricing.
3) Click the “Start free trial” button at the bottom of the Silver 1 month plan.
4) You’ll be redirected to the checkout page.
5) Here click on “Apply Coupon”, enter the coupon code Seedrs_2020, and click on the arrow.
6) Proceed to the regular checkout.

Since CityFalcon use a third-party out-of-the-box solution, you will need to provide credit card details to receive the trial. Cancel before the trial ends and you should not incur any charges.

Please note that any discounts, rewards and/or offers listed by a company in its campaign are subject to the terms and conditions applied by that company and listed above. It is the company’s responsibility to honour such discounts, rewards and/or offers and Seedrs does not take any responsibility for them.