How 2 bankers and an engineer built a startup to overthrow the Bloomberg Terminal

Founded by Yusuke Umeda, Ryosuke Niino, and Yusuke Inagaki in April 2008, Uzabase’s first product is SPEEDA, a company database information platform built for industry analysts.

Two of the three co-founders were bankers at UBS. They teamed up with a systems consultant to form a trio who aim to upend the financial industry. Umeda told Tech in Asia:

While the salary is great, we didn’t quite enjoy our work. I couldn’t find information efficiently to do my job well. At UBS, I usually had to work until midnight. A lot of needless time was spent on searching for information. It’s really inefficient.

Frustrated with data digging, Niino and Umeda left UBS to build SPEEDA with Inagaki. It serves many of the same functions as Bloomberg Terminal but only better, faster, and sleeker. “Bloomberg Terminal is really difficult to use. SPEEDA has better UX and speed. We focus on usability,” says Umeda.

(See: A genius idea was born after 2 entrepreneurs grew frustrated with corporate processes)

While Umeda has extensive experience in the financial industry, SPEEDA had little reputation back then, so it was really hard to convince content providers to work with them. “The content providers didn’t trust us. So we thought, instead of asking them to pay a lump sum, we proposed a revenue share model. It worked because they had nothing to lose,” he says.

In 2009, shortly after its founding, SPEEDA broke-even and was profitable. But to scale quickly, Uzabase accepted an undisclosed investment from GMO Ventures Partners and other leading Japanese venture capital firms in the same year. In 2012, it received around US$2 million in investment from Globis Capital. SPEEDA charges its clients a subscription fee of about US$1,200 per month for a minimum of one year.

Today, SPEEDA is available in both Japanese and English and tracks over 98 percent of the world’s listed companies and 170,000 private companies from across 180 countries and 550 industries. It claims to be Asia’s largest company and industry database. Besides Tokyo, Uzabase has offices in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, employing over 100 staff.

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