Today, we bought a data platform!

Here is how it happened!

Not much more than a couple of weeks ago I found my self chatting to Pedro J. Aguayo, the CTO of the soon to be shutdown IEX Cloud, a pioneering fully digital SAAS platform for market and financial data.  I’d had the privilege of scaling the platform during the first 18 months of COVID - when despite all the associated challenges we tripled our subscriber and revenue base! We hired Pedro in that period and we immediately hit it off. He mentioned that while IEX was closing “the business”, they would be open to selling the technology and IP.  

Pedro had been diligently cleaning up the platform - and we did the math - and knowing how much clients loved the product we agreed to make an offer.  And with some negotiation - we quickly got the non-binding agreement to purchase the assets of IEX Cloud. Two weeks later Pedro and I became co-founders of Blue-Sky API.com, which bought the assets from IEX. 

Today (30 Aug, 2024) is the last day of operation of IEX Cloud - and next week it will be reborn initially as Blue Sky API - and ultimately something else - yet to be revealed.Shout out to the team at IEX for moving so quickly - I know this was a heavy lift to get this done so quickly, and to our backers more generally.So what next?  Well this has all happened so quickly - we have some Blue-Sky Thinking to do! 

Day one - standup the infra and turn on as much on as possible - and we hope to have a site up by next week, and end points lighting up soon after that. It runs on Google Cloud Platform - so hopefully that'll all go smoothly. Then we'll see what new business problems we can solve, beyond the original mission of being the "Easy button" for market data for Fintechs.

Meanwhile I remain committed to my role at Expero - and the exciting work we are doing to develop ground breaking applications and solutions in financial services. I can absolutely see the value of us becoming part of the Expero CONNECTED Finance eco system - and given how lean the Blue-Sky API team will be - I suspect BSA will become a customer!