Uptrends Update - Jan 2024

This is a copy of my monthly Uptrends stakeholder update (slightly modified). My hope in sharing here is that it may be a helpful view into Uptrends and a useful reference for other founders writing updates of their own. Cheers:

Hello and Happy new year!

I am sending this email to a short list of investors, advisors, friends and stakeholders, to update you on our progress heading into 2025 and ask for your input.

Pivoting

Near the end of 2024 we decided to pivot Uptrends because we realized that detecting stock market insights in YouTube videos was a way more powerful business than sending customizable stock market news alerts. This became obvious to us after many conversations with large funds asking if we could do long-form video data.

YouTube Data

So recently we’ve built out a library of more than 30,000 market-relevant YouTube channels with data going back 10+ years. Our internal AI models allow us to automatically detect mentions and tradable insights for any public company, catalogued by speaker across millions of videos — this is extremely valuable to hedge funds and corporations looking to incorporate mass media into their trading and risk models, and (importantly) no one else is doing this. We're keeping it more or less in stealth mode for the time being.

90-Day Progress

We’ve made great progress in this new domain over the past 90 days. We’ve built a first-of-its-kind dataset, signed trial agreements with multiple top-20 hedge funds, brought on two killer advisors with decades experience selling data on Wall Street, and closed $90K in funding to expand our data models and runway. I’m extremely excited for the year ahead, to continue building out a compelling business in this space. 

Fundraising

Over the coming months as our sales pipeline continues to grow we intend to raise an additional [redacted] in seed funding to expand our team and scale the business. Existing investors will have the opportunity to follow-on with additional investment at their original valuation. My belief is that this funding will enable us to [redacted]

Consumer App

Regarding our consumer-facing news alerts product, we intend to sell it in an asset sale this year, and are currently in talks with multiple prospective purchasers. We have deactivated the platform for the mean-time. It’s a bit bittersweet moving on from a product we’ve put so much into, but in selling it our hope is that it can still be a valuable asset for a different business, perhaps in a different light. 

Our Ask

As our investor, advisor, friend, or stakeholder we thank you for your support over this past year, and we’d love your input as we look ahead on this exciting new chapter. Our simple ask is that you respond to this email with any thoughts, or let us know if you’d like to schedule a quick call to catch up this month.

Thank you,
Ramsey and Sam
Uptrends (Babbl Labs Inc.)