Featured Startup Pitch: qplum – Smart investing for individuals

COMPANY: qplum

ELEVATOR PITCH

Institutional trading strategies for individuals.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

qplum is a service that puts you in control of your investments, where we believe smart investing is a mix of strategies rather than product choices. Using quantitative methods and technology, fearless investing is possible. We are a quantitative research firm offering all our trading strategies to asset managers via APIs. We are also a robo-advisor in ETFs and futures.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

Mansi Singhal has over 10 years of experience in portfolio management and her last job was at a $30 billion hedge fund, where she was managing a $100 million portfolio for them. Prior to that, she was a trader at several big banks like Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia Bank. She completed a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and currently holds Series 65 and Series 3 certifications.

Gaurav Chakravorty, the co-founder, is one of the early pioneers in high-frequency trading. He built the most profitable algorithmic trading group at Tower Research from 2005-to-2010 and was the youngest partner in the firm. The strategies developed by Gaurav and their offshoots have made more than a billion dollars of profits over the last ten years. Gaurav is also a co-founder of DV Capital, which currently trades in over 20 markets across the world using algorithmic systems. Gaurav has been one of the most successful fintech data scientists in the last ten years.

Mansi and Gaurav feel that great investment management is about building systems to do a lot of things well. There is no silver bullet. That’s why we are working on execution, trading infrastructure, data science infrastructure, alpha strategies, tax allocation methods, and macroeconomic forecasting, among others.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

On one side you have banks and hedge funds that are either not affordable or not reachable for most of us. On the other side, you have many ‘robo-advisors’ coming up that make it very easy to invest, but the quality of advice and execution is still very naive. qplum is bridging the gap between these two disconnected halves by packaging different trading strategies and our algorithmic execution of the same in a neat, online offering.

BUSINESS MODEL

Sign-up on the website is free. Flat fee as a percent of AUM when investing in a portfolio.

HEADQUARTERS: Jersey City, New Jersey

WEBSITE: qplum.co

YEAR FOUNDED: 2014

TWITTER: @qplum_team

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/qplum

LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/qplum