Babbl Labs - May Update

Friends, family, investors, countrymen,

May was a tremendous month for Babbl Labs. We officially delivered our MVP YouTube dataset to 6 of the world's largest hedge funds, exceeded our H1 goals five weeks early, and laid the foundation to be post-revenue within the next 90 days. The demand for video intelligence continues to exceed our most optimistic projections.

Company Overview

Babbl Labs transforms the world's video content into strategic intelligence for big business. We monitor thousands of long-form videos from content platforms like YouTube to extract mentions of companies, brands, and market-moving insights into structured data feeds that funds and corporates can integrate directly into their trading and risk models. With 6 trillion minutes of YouTube watched in the US alone in 2024, and experts/influencers increasingly turning to long-form channels as their primary content format, we're unlocking an untapped goldmine of alpha-generating signals that move markets days before traditional media.

Help Wanted / Asks

• Strategic introductions - we’re looking for intro's to systematic hedge funds with $1B+ AUM who are already using alternative data, F500 corporates seeking better brand perception / competitive analysis solutions, and individual content creators seeking idea discovery / performance insight tools.

• Technical advisor - we are looking to bring on a formal tech advisor this quarter, someone who's scaled ML infrastructure to billions of records and can advise on GPU optimization, distributed processing, and data pipeline architecture as we grow.

Highlights

• Crushed our H1 2025 goals - At the beginning of 2025 we set out to build our MVP, secure 5+ trial clients, and raise $250K. We exceeded all three over the past few weeks (with more than 5 weeks to spare).

• Launched MVP dataset to 6 of the world's top 20 hedge funds - Delivered our trial YouTube dataset to our first 6 funds this month; the dataset now contains 3.5M+ company mentions across 500K+ videos from 10K+ expert and influencer channels

• Named #2 most popular vendor at Neudata NYC Data Summit - Met with 11 funds, exceeding our 10-meeting cap. The validation was overwhelming (see picture below of Doug and I at the event!) 

• Signed hardware deal for GPU infrastructure - Building out and hosting our own servers on premise out of US Internet’s data center in Minnetonka, MN gives us 10x cost advantage over cloud solutions and complete control over our processing pipeline.

Lowlights

• Revenue conversions take time - With typical hedge fund trial periods lasting 60-90 days, our first paying customers will convert in July-August. The feedback so far has been exceptional and we're tracking toward $180K+ ARR by August/September Q3.

• Scaling faster than our infrastructure - We’ve quickly outgrown our original data infrastructure, which delayed our initial trial data deliveries slightly. Another reason we're accelerating by building out our own hosted data center servers to stay ahead of demand.

• Data quality assurance - We continue to build out more scalable data QA processes to meet our service requirements. This month we hired a Data Quality Analyst, Joel Day, and an on-demand team of QA moderators, this will be a continued point of emphasis going forward.

Product Roadmap

• MVP Dataset (Launched May 2025) - Our foundational YouTube intelligence offering  monitors 10K+ curated market-relevant channels, featuring proprietary speaker identification that tracks commentary from thousands of executives and analysts, along with enhanced sentiment analysis, giving our initial clients visibility into market-moving commentary days before traditional channels.

• Next 90 Days - Based on early feedback, we're launching our API for intra-day data delivery, building an advertiser dataset for brand tracking, and developing our own fine-tuned LLM for better entity detection.

• H2 2025 - Looking beyond active licenses in the asset management space in Q3, we plan to expand product offerings into corporate intelligence and creator analytics. We've already established LOIs with strategic partners these verticals, and anticipate a Seed funding round on the order of $1.5-3M near the end of 2025 to enable this vision.

Business Development

• Delivery of initial trial datasets - 6 funds now in active trials (combined $1T+ AUM), priced at $75-150K annual licenses. Average expected trial completion is between July-September 2025; at a conservative 30% conversion = $140K ARR in Q3

• BattleFin Discovery Day (June 10-11) - Presenting to 30+ funds at a premier alternative data conference in New York City as a finalist in BattleFin’s Alt Data challenge.

• Inbound interest accelerating - Pipeline grew 67% month-over-month, thanks in large part to our advisors Doug Hopkins (former head of sales for Context Analytics, Idacity (acquired)), and Sean Austin (founder of Markets EQ, acquired) for opening doors with clients on Wall Street.

• Multiple LOIs with media intelligence partners including Podchaser and Gudea to establish products in the corporate corporate expansion and begin our expansion into verticals outside of asset management.

Kudos / Closing Thoughts

Six months ago, we decided to sell our consumer news monitoring business Uptrends.ai, focusing here on enterprise video intelligence. Today, we're trialing with funds collectively managing over $1T in AUM. The speed of this transformation has been tremendous, and it's only possible because of the incredible support and guidance from many of you.

The world is waking up to the insight we've known all along. To quote one of our PM prospects at a large quantitative hedge fund: “The most valuable  commentary now happens in long-form video interviews, podcasts, and product reviews, not earnings calls.” We're building the infrastructure to unlock this future at scale.

May the force be with you,

Ramsey, Sam and the Babbl Labs Team