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What commodities are you focused on? Like, softs, energy, metals etc
Our first few customers are agriculture based. Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa and more things like this that have similar distribution supply chains. We believe we have the tools and expertise to expand to energy and metal in the future. They are much different, but we believe with the tools we have developed, they can be repurposed quickly to support a wide range of commodities.
Out of interest, why not start a commodity trading house instead?
We have had this thought was well. It's tough to go into a vertical with software because you end up with tools that make it easier to get an edge, and then why not just trade yourself? Generally, we just enjoy building software and it suits our personalities better. But we do believe that it is a good benchmark for our product to think, "could we use our tools to have a better edge in the market if we were a trade h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have had this thought was well. It's tough to go into a vertical with software because you end up with tools that make it easier to get an edge, and then why not just trade yourself? Generally, we just enjoy building software and it suits our personalities better. But we do believe that it is a good benchmark for our product to think, "could we use our tools to have a better edge in the market if we were a trade h…
Right, fair enough. It does seem like some of the very big trading houses (glencore, trafi etc) could be built from scratch with a modern stack.
We believe however that we offer better tools at a cheaper price and can get it into their hands now!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have had this thought was well. It's tough to go into a vertical with software because you end up with tools that make it easier to get an edge, and then why not just trade yourself? Generally, we just enjoy building software and it suits our personalities better. But we do believe that it is a good benchmark for our product to think, "could we use our tools to have a better edge in the market if we were a trade h…
Right, fair enough. It does seem like some of the very big trading houses (glencore, trafi etc) could be built from scratch with a modern stack.
To this point, I work with folks who are experts at accessing, organizing, tagging, and triaging data. If you'd like to set up a call, I'd be more than willing to facilitate.
I'd guess that only an established (or former) trader already using the tool with a deep network of contacts could convince other traders to use it. And then of course there is the whole other problem of enterprise sales and penetrating big financial companies (legal, compliance, procurement, infosec, etc.). So maybe you start with small traders? But my understanding of commodities trading was that is kind of like high frequency trading - there are only large, very established players.
My opinion is that this is not really a tech problem, this is a business problem. Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool? Does it "just work", without any "let me get back to my product people"? Also, of course, every commodity market is completely different and has a whole web of intricate details in logistics, regulation, product,…
It's a great way to break into a market, but there's also less lock-in and forced virality relative to a system that you encourage suppliers/partners/counterparties to use. Which can be compensated for by word of mouth and ease of onboarding! But this can be a double-edged sword, particularly when investors are evaluating whether you're (planning to be) necessary or expendable to the industry.
My opinion is that this is not really a tech problem, this is a business problem. Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool? Does it "just work", without any "let me get back to my product people"? Also, of course, every commodity market is completely different and has a whole web of intricate details in logistics, regulation, product,…
Our CEO Philip is exactly that, a commodities trader with 8 years experience and a wide network for us to tap into.
As for every commodity market being different with its own intricate details, you are right. We are taking an approach to start in agriculture (sugar, coffee, cocoa) because these have similar supply chains. However, we are building configurable tools from the foundation to support more complex customizations to allow companies to easily tailor the solutions to their needs.
We have also had some calls recently with commodity producers who have shown a lot of interest in the platform so far, because they many of them manage their own logistics teams internally, which opens up an additional market outside of just the big trading players.
I really appreciate your feedback, thank you.
My opinion is that this is not really a tech problem, this is a business problem. Will the traders at Cargill, Vitol, Exxon, Trafigura, Glencore buy it? Do they want to take the time to "learn" another tool? Does it "just work", without any "let me get back to my product people"? Also, of course, every commodity market is completely different and has a whole web of intricate details in logistics, regulation, product,…
From what I'm reading above, the pitch is more "I can keep using my existing systems, but use this tool as a layer on top to help me with my data entry and anomaly detection, and our clients/external parties don't need to know that we have these superpowers." It's a great way to break into a market, but there's also less lock-in and forced virality relative to a system that you encourage suppliers/partners/counterpar…
Congrats and keep up the good work! Can you describe your tech stack and challenges you faced in your first 6 months - we love to learn from your experiences.
Hey there! We have worked extensively with many of the latest LLM models and tried many different techniques to solve the various problems for our customers. We use a combination of tools from Google and OpenAI to leverage LLMs. We use React and Heroku to support the web application. The biggest challenge so far has been getting good field extraction and the ability to accurately search millions of documents using NL…