Uptrends Update - Feb 2025

Hello friends, family, investors, stakeholders, enemies, and onlookers, here’s the Uptrends February 2025 current state: 

Overview

The market is speaking, and our thesis is being validated. What started as an AI/ML news monitoring pipeline for stock market investors has evolved into something much more valuable: the first data platform capable of extracting institutional-grade trading signals from long-form video content at scale. Major quantitative funds have taken notice, and we're now moving quickly to capture this untapped opportunity.

Progress 

• We've built the world's largest structured dataset of financial YouTube video content to my knowledge, covering 60k+ market-relevant channels, 1 million videos, and 75k+ experts with sentiment/opinions catalogued over time

• We've seen great demand from the world's largest asset managers. This month we're kicking off our first trial with a $250B AUM quantitative fund

• Two additional funds (combined $12T AUM) are in trial contracting stages, and 5 more in earlier stages. We’re accelerating quickly, and so far it’s been entirely inbound while still in “stealth mode”

• We've brought on two powerhouse strategic advisors to help us scale:

  • Doug Hopkins (ex-Citi, Amenity, Context Analytic) will lead our sales pipeline, bringing direct relationships with dozens of target funds and deep expertise in selling alternative data on Wall Street

  • Sean Austin (founder, Markets EQ and Helios, former Klarna, Spotify) will advise on our product roadmap and go-to-market approach, with experience building AI-driven market intelligence platforms for funds, corporates and beyond.

Next Steps 

• As we begin actively licensing with funds over the next few months we will continue to build out our sales pipeline – begin outbound, launch website, attend industry events, and list on data marketplaces

• Target: reach 12 hedge fund clients this year, establish data partnerships, and begin to sign LOIs with corporate users

• Continue scaling our AI infrastructure to support enterprise-grade deployment and expanding our proprietary analysis capabilities to cover as much of the YouTube landscape as possible, then onto other content media

Fundraising 

• We're raising an additional $250K to build out our AI infrastructure and deliver to our first few hedge fund clients

• We've raised $522K to date pre-pivot, most on a $4M value cap / 20% discount SAFE

• Have a few existing investors who've given soft commitments to follow-on

• This is likely the final allocation at this valuation - we're targeting a larger institutional round later this year once we've established category leadership

Bonus: We are in talks with potential buyers for our original Uptrends retail platform, validating both our technology foundation and our pivot to institutional clients. As such we will be formally adopting the name Babbl Labs going forward (which has been our corporate legal name all along)

Best,
Ramsey