viaNexus: One Year On

A year ago, practically to the day, three of us acquired a data platform from U.S. exchange IEX - with minimal diligence and a lot of conviction. That story was captured in Waters Technology, where it quickly became one of the most widely read articles of the year.

Since then, it’s been a journey. Today, I’m proud to say we are RRG — “ready for revenue recognition,” in Reuters-speak — and poised for what comes next.

From Acquisition to Rethinking the Model

Our initial plan was simple: lash everything together and win a few quick clients. But once we took stock, we realized the opportunity was much larger.

The platform we acquired had been built for scale and resilience, with a bunch of new capabilities that had been built after I left IEX in 2021 — perhaps most notably the ability to onboard data rapidly and automatically generate the highly normalized APIs which developers loved. We dubbed this “the Easy Button”.

At the same time, our research showed a clear market gap: independent data providers — many of them trusted colleagues and friends — needed better ways to deliver data to customers. On the other side, consumers were actively seeking alternatives to the expensive, inflexible bundles of the large aggregators.

We didn’t want to be a pure wholesaler, weighed down by the cost and subject-matter burden of building every dataset ourselves. Instead, the platform was perfectly positioned to connect creators of high-quality data with the firms that needed it — in an easy, on-demand, normalized form.

Why viaNexus Is Different

We’ve seen other attempts at data marketplaces — Snowflake, Amazon — but neither were built for financial services. They don’t monetize data effectively, normalize it for interoperability, or support low-latency streaming. Our platform was.

That realization gave rise to our mission:

To empower the future of finance by making data accessible, affordable, actionable, and insightful for everyone.

viaNexus is a financial data platform designed to democratize access to high-quality information. We do this through subscription-based access with flexible tiers. Clients can start small — say, data on 100 equities — and scale up to unlimited access. Like Amazon Prime, there’s a core bundle of 25 APIs - with broad appeal, plus premium datasets from expert partners and proprietary products from viaNexus.

For providers, we offer everything they need: transparent controls, fair revenue share, and freedom to set pricing. Our modern licensing agreement — tested in multiple deals — has proven simple, fair, and effective.

For consumers, we’ve made the Easy Button work too: no annual contracts, no hidden gotchas, just fast, fair, normalized APIs.

 Building the Content

Our growing partner network spans areas like news, earnings transcripts, fundamentals, earnings estimates, and indices.   

Alongside that, we’ve developed proprietary datasets such as:

• VNX — our U.S. equities real-time derived price feed, free from exchange licensing burdens, built algorithmically and with data sourced from multiple venues.
• Logos & Company Profiles — curated company metadata.
• Filings and as reported financials — normalized data from SEC Edgar, making filings LLM-ready.

Product, Design & Delivery

With the blueprint in hand, we moved fast. But we quickly realized: our engineering team were pipeline and feed experts, not web designers. We needed more than a “nice site” — we needed a seamless process for discovery, purchase, and consumption, fully integrated with Stripe – our payments provider

Enter Expero, a partner I’d worked with before. They helped us transform the vision into a design and workflow that works for both business and technical users.

At the same time, with support from Google, we tuned and upgraded the GCP-based platform for the scale we knew was coming.

Beyond the Tech: Building a Company

Platforms don’t succeed without companies around them. In year one we had to put foundations in place: legal entity, shareholder agreement, bank accounts, payroll, benefits, trademark registrations, budgeting, and financial controls. We were fortunate to have guidance and support from many along the way.

 One surprisingly tough challenge: branding. After research and false starts, we landed on viaNexus and a logo that captures our purpose:

• Two spheres — providers and consumers.
• An intersection — the Nexus.
• Square nodes — on both sides, our customers.
• A nod to the cloud — API-first and cloud-native.
• A bright, tech-forward palette.

Thanks again Expero for working with us on the logo, and creating the myriad of versions (image formats, full color, reverse color horizontal and vertical).

Team & Culture

They say “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s true.

From my fellow founders, to our talented engineers, to our partners at Expero, we are united by our mission. As a remote-first firm, we rely on stand-ups, weekly demos, and Slack to stay aligned — and connected as people. What helped most: our engineers knew the platform, had worked together at IEX, and were proud to see it go on to an even brighter future.

Our AI Story

Needless to say, AI is transforming financial services — and us along with it.  TBH we couldn’t have made the progress we’ve made without AI.

Internally, AI has boosted productivity: Cursor for coding, meeting companions in Google Meet, AI in Slack, Google NotebooksLM for servicing due diligence questionnaires (huge win!). Externally, we’re building for the next generation of agent-based workflows.

But we’re also realistic. Giving agents free rein to scrape uncontrolled data is a liability for customers: not just hallucinations, but rights and licensing. That’s why we’ve been vocal about agentic workflows that respect entitlements and IP.

We are closely watching Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s promising but still early. As our CTO Pedro Aguayo noted in July, there is work to do before it meets institutional standards - and rather than wait - he set to work enabling our data to seamlessly work with ALL LLMs, ALL agent frameworks - in a fully secure and entitled way. And by doing it right, there is no need for pages of prompt engineering – the intelligence is built in to the data.

Looking Ahead

The first year was about building the foundation. The next will be about unleashing it.

• Expanding datasets across asset classes and regions.
• Deepening partnerships with providers and institutions.
• Enabling AI-native, agentic consumption of financial data.
• Continuing to differentiate viaNexus as the speed-layer for finance.

We’ve rebuilt a platform loved by developers, expanded it with content, and refined it for today’s needs.

The future of financial data is open, agentic, and fast. viaNexus is ready.

If you have data, and would like to work with us – reach out.  If you are a builder, or just looking to upgrade your data at a lower price point – sign up and try us out.  The free tier is there for a reason.