Interview with Sandro Gvelesiani, CEO of IntellectSpace

Intellectspace provides market intelligence to the finance industry by taking the abundance of unstructured data that is in the public domain to determine relationships between key market players. We do this by utilizing our proprietary natural language processing.

That is the problem in the finance industry today. There is an information overload by analysts, associates, managing directors. We provide the ability to create insights into the actionable intelligence rather than just raw data.

Good question. I was reading the Wall Street Journal and thinking about the billions of dollars that were lost during the corporate scandals of 2002. I thought to myself that it would be extremely useful to aggregate multiple pieces of information into one simple paradigm and give that to an investor. They could perhaps avoid mistakes. I realized that it is possible to get filings, news articles, and press releases and make sense of them.

The answer to that is we look at the information from two angles. We look at the information in respect to links and notes available in the marketplace, on companies, people, organizations, government entities, education, mutual funds and industries. These links bind two entities together. For example; board positions, executive positions, suppliers, partners, family members education and government are often linked together.

If a person has political contributions, went to school, works with an organization or is supplying money to its competitor, it provides all the information that is needed to tie individual history in a way that connects people and companies.

We provide all the analytics behind relationships between different companies. Our system uses a database to determine the relationships between companies and individuals.

During an annual proxy voting for mutual funds board member, most of the time they have investment strategies that could mandate that these guys have to vote for a specific board member that?s independent in nature. It takes a lot of time to determine who is independent because they have to manually research each member. With our service they simply click that person?s name and see if there are any relationships that they need to know about.

We are looking to target the investment banking side of the business. They are very focused on identifying strategies for investment propositions, investment prospects, advice on portfolio management, mutual funds, fund managers and hedge funds.

Selling directly.

Well first of all our market is associated in New York mostly. It?s a very concentrated market. We plan to grow virally. People just hear about us and contact us directly. We reach out by contacting target analysts who lead the way for others.

Well there are multiple opportunities but of course a partnership opportunity can create a real valuable business with companies such as Thompson Financial, Reuters and others because of the nature of the data that we provide. Our unique ability to make sense of a lot of the financial data would be invaluable to any of these organizations. I feel that the market is very large because there is this fundamental problem in taking modern information and making sense of it.

Many times one document does not have information about everything you need to know about a subject. So you have to look at multiple documents to gather the information. The question is how do you know if looking at ten different sources is enough or you have to look at 20 sources. We acknowledge the sources, extract relationship data that connects multiple concepts together and create one knowledge output in the form of a knowledge map.

Absolutely. The use of IntellectSpace can be justified in the media for instance. Identifying relationships between top executives is a key issue. The legal industry could also use this to help with litigation and understanding relationships as well.

Absolutely.

2003.

Attract the smartest advisors as you can possibly bring on. Our model is based upon expediting the investment process, and we targeted bringing on advisors that would need this type of service.

We actually launched in July, but there will be another version launched at the end of the year.

Half a dozen. I can?t provide their names, but its half a dozen of the usual individuals within the top tier of the finance industry.

We?ve seen a great response. They have really helped us to shape the service. We have tried to be as customer centric as possible and the need is definitely there. These professionals are looking for services that can make their jobs easier. We address it. We are working very closely with them to fully address the problem.

People don?t really think that it?s possible to get an output of the same caliber in one year that encompasses so many different facts and multiple sources. So that?s been quite a pleasant surprise. The interesting feedback that I get, that I am proud of is the input that is more specific to knowledge management.

Willingness to work hard, willingness to take risk, willingness to and ability to adapt to different situations. I feel that adaptability is more important than education. I feel that given that a person is enthusiastic about the mission and their goals are in line with the company?s then the end result I think will be a perfect fit.

eProject actually accomplished a lot in its span and it?s still doing great. I feel that the key ability that I bring is my being able to organize a development effort that can leverage the key tools. Another is create a mindset in individuals in a very quick manner that enables a rapid execution. I believe that the eProject development team was very good at that and that there were great lessons on how to work with the team members as a team player. It is also important to have the vision and encourage collaboration with these individuals to ensure that everyone is part of the team effort.