In this digital transformation age when many new businesses are springing up to meet up with the demands of post-covid, customer satisfaction is very important and an early-stage startup ecosystem rating system is even more important to help investors and sales teams determine how well the startup is doing. James Giancotti, CEO of Oddup, talks to TechBullion about the platform and the opportunities it provides.
Please tell us a little more about yourself?
My name is James Giancotti and I am the co-founder and CEO of Oddup, a startup rating system. Although a lawyer by qualification, I began my career in consulting at Deloitte before moving into investment banking and research roles at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. After nearly a decade of advising high-growth companies, I made the shift to investor and entrepreneur to follow my passion for startups and innovation. Since then, I have partnered and invested in successful startups across Asia, exiting two of them, before co-founding Oddup.
Now, I currently manage dual roles as the CEO of Oddup and Alluva, the largest global analyst marketplace for crypto assets.
What is Oddup?
The short answer is an early-stage startup ecosystem rating system. The more comprehensive answer is that Oddup is a data-driven platform that provides investors and sales teams with a detailed analysis on the potential success of a startup. Our rating system is based on an algorithm that pulls together data often used in the investment due diligence process, factoring in quality, growth, location, investors, market, regulations, valuations and investment returns.
What is the current global market size of the business intelligence market and what trends should we look out for?
The business intelligence market was valued at more than $20 billion in 2020 and is only expected to continue to grow. The demand is being accelerated by digital transformation, cloud adoption and an overall increase in data generation.
As the world becomes more digital, there is a massive amount of data available. It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated each day. Especially as businesses look to get an edge over competitors, good data can be an asset that propels a company ahead or, in our case, makes a good investment decision.
Oddup is the world’s largest startup rating agency, how does it work and what specific services do you provide?
Our rating system is based on a combination of analyst view points and a computed algorithm. The system pulls together data factoring in quality, growth, location, investors, market, regulations, valuations and investment returns to create the Oddup Score.
Similar to sell-side equity research, the startup rating scores provide an unbiased opinion based on proprietary research and then offered as views: Buy, Hold, Sell.
We currently track entrepreneurial and investment activity across more than 300,000 companies, 63,000 investors,15 sectors and 30 territories giving our customers a vast amount of data to compare companies against industry peers and easily conduct due diligence.
As a former investment banker and strategist, how much does your experience at Deloitte Consulting, Capgemini, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs influence your decisions at Oddup?
I spent more than a decade researching companies’ financials to determine their value and assessing investment risks and opportunities. I saw firsthand the challenges that most institutional investors constantly confronted, and the biggest obstacle was a lack of reliable collated, analyst insights that overcome subjectivity. We created Oddup to address this problem and give investors more transparency and insight to make an informed investment decision.
Oddup recently announced it was expanding into crypto. How does Oddup plan to help investors identify and invest in the best crypto startups?
Our goal is to be the leading resource of information and data for every kind of investment interaction in the startup domain. As we expand into the crypto sector, we will apply our proven methods of data collection and analysis to give investors tools that evolve with the landscape.
Crypto-related companies brought in more funding in the first quarter of this year alone than in all of 2020, showing the industry is heating up for investors. However, as institutional investors flock toward the crypto startups, the question becomes how do we not fall back into the high-risk scenarios of the past like the largely unregulated ICOs, and that’s where we plan to offer a solution.
Do you have any available opportunities for investors and partners at Oddup, what is next on your roadmap?
Looking ahead, we have partnerships in the pipeline with several key players in the investment space. We will be adding more charts and analyst-led data to the platform to give our customers more visibility in the startup and crypto world. We will also be introducing some new offerings to help promote investment in early-stage crypto startups.
Do you have more information for our readers?
Stay tuned to the Oddup Blog and follow us on Twitter and Facebook where we share all of our new initiatives and ways to get involved.
