YCharts Announces $6 Million in Funding, Hires Morningstar Executive
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Financial software company YCharts announced Monday it had closed a $6 million C round and appointed a Morningstar executive as chief revenue officer in an attempt to accelerate growth and expand its sales team.
The Chicago-based company, founded in 2010 by Shawn Carpenter and Ara Anjargolian, has now raised $14.5 million. Morningstar led the funding round, which closed May 4 and included investments from I2A, Amicus Capital Partners, Hyde Park Angels and Reed Elsevier. The company said it would use the money to spur the growth of its sales team.
The company also announced the hiring of Jeremy Diamond, former head of buy-side solutions for Morningstar who also served on YCharts’ board. Prior to Morningstar, he held multiple roles at Capital IQ. Diamond will work to grow the enterprise sales team, the company said.
The company has also hired a director of marketing, Romola McKenzie, who is set to begin Monday, Carpenter said.
Carpenter, YCharts’ CEO, said the company had delayed emphasis on marketing and advertising.
The company now employs about 30 in Chicago and 15 in New York City and plans to hire aggressively, Carpenter said.
“A lot of companies get an idea and think it has traction in the market, and then they hire a huge sales team to go big and go fast, and maybe sometimes get over their skis where there’s not totally a fit,” Diamond said. “[YCharts was] super conservative about not wanting to do that.”
YCharts’ web-based technology, which it calls “the financial terminal of the web,” includes data about companies, funds, indexes and economic indicators, as well as services such as stock and fund screeners, to help users make investment decisions. Carpenter said the site gets about 1 million monthly users.
Carpenter said he thinks the company has built out a product to make it competitive with the financial information industry’s big players such as Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ and Reuters — on which he said the company has focused since 2010. Carpenter said the company originally estimated it would take four to five years to do so. He said the company reached product/market fit in August 2014.
The technology, primarily used by registered investment advisors and wealth managers, doesn’t include each of the features that might be found in a Bloomberg subscription, which can cost more than $20,000 annually, according to the New York Times. YCharts’ services cost less than $4,000 annually per user, Carpenter said.
“People are paying for everything that’s in the system, and most of them use a tiny fraction of what’s available,” Carpenter said, referring to such comprehensive products. “Our approach is, then let’s build everything that most people use in the system and do a really good job with that … We don’t have the satellite images of oil fields, but how many people actually use that?”