Crowdsense: “For crypto, social media is the new fundamental”

“2021, along with the impact of Covid-19, led to many changes in the industry that included the rise of retail traders trading from home, the rise of cryptocurrency, and the apparent impact of social media hype and sentiment on price changes for stocks and crypto,” explained Crowdsense co-founder and CEO Eliaz Tobias. The company, which originally started to identify a pain point in corporate security, evolved and has since become a social media-based investment platform for cryptocurrencies.

“Traditional trading in crypto has often focused on “on-chain metrics” and traditional metrics employed in other channels,” he explained. But crypto behaves differently and we recognized a strong reliance on retail investor sentiment as a price driver. One that is both significantly more impactful than in other industries, and much easier for us to track and analyze on the web.”

Eliaz Tobias (left) and Eran Ruso

Already with 40,000 users, Crowdsense claims to help users make money by providing them with information about the retail sentiment on crypto.

Company Name: Crowdsense

Sector: Fintech / AI

Product/Service description:

Crowdsense.ai is the social media-based investment platform for cryptocurrencies. Crowdsense enables retail and institutional investors to gain early access to predictive signals for market movers such as changes in social-media momentum, sentiment, influencers, or any other chatter-related events.

Crowdsense is the most comprehensive platform for early detection of early signals for market-moving events. It is based on real-time analysis of billions of unique sources across Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, and websites.

Crowdsense is already deployed with 40,000 users worldwide, who are aware of opportunities and risks before anyone else. Crowdsense signals are available through desktop terminal, mobile apps, API, and other forms of notifications.

Founder Bios:

Eliaz (Eli) Tobias is the CEO & Co-Founder of Crowdsense.ai, the transactional intelligence platform that detects early events and changes in social media metrics related to stocks and crypto. He brings 20+ years of professional, management, and leadership experience in product, business, and technology. Prior to becoming a full-time entrepreneur, he was the VP of Product for Alcatel-Lucent's (Acquired by Nokia) cloud business unit. Earlier on, he was with Microsoft for almost a decade, including being part of Azure's founding team. In his last role as the global enterprise business lead for Microsoft Azure, in Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, he founded the enterprise product and business of the cloud, now a multi-billion-dollar business. Earlier on, he has been the Country CTO and Presale Group Manager for development and cloud platforms for Microsoft Israel. Before joining Microsoft, he was the head of software development across startups such as MDG Medical and Ezface. Mr. Tobias holds a B.Sc. in computer sciences and an MBA from Tel Aviv University, both with distinction.

Eran Ruso is the CTO & Co-Founder of Crowdsense.ai. He is a software development leader with 15+ years of senior experience across software development, machine learning, technology, and teams leadership across startups and corporations. Currently, Eran is the hands-on leader of all aspects of technology, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, backend architecture, complex multi-cloud deployment, and overall software development. Prior to founding Crowdsense, Eran spent more than five years leading technology teams in Super Derivatives and then ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. Before that, Eran led the 70+ people technology software department of CET, responsible for groundbreaking education projects. Prior to that, working for the Microsoft partners of SRL and E4D, Eran was a hands-on software technologies consultant for dozens of startups and organizations.

Year of Founding: 2019 (2021 had a pivot to crypto).

Last Investment Round: $600,000

Last Investment Stage: Seed

Date of Last Investment: June 2021

Total investment to date: $1.5 million

Investors (leading and all): Techstars, Barclays, WIX founder's family office, UK / EU / IL Angels

Current number of employees: 10

Open positions:

Head of Business Development & Sales; Data Scientist; Frontend Developer; Backend Integrations Developer

Website:
https://www.crowdsense.ai/

Social Media Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crowdsenseai/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crowdsense.ai/
Telegram: https://t.me/CrowdsenseSignals

Interview:

How was the idea born?

The idea for Crowdsense evolved over time. Originally, it started from a pain in corporate security. Soon it pivoted to capital markets, and then, in 2021, we decided to focus on crypto.

2021, along with the impact of Covid-19, led to many changes in the industry that included the rise of retail traders trading from home, the rise of cryptocurrency, and the apparent impact of social media hype and sentiment on price changes for stocks and crypto. After discussions with a few of our investors during May 2021, we raised some more money and focused our first product on crypto, which was launched in August 2021. Four months later, we now have 40,000 users using our product for early insights in social media, and we are now launching our paid plans to monetize the platform.

What is the need for the product?

Traditional trading in crypto has often focused on “on-chain metrics” and traditional metrics employed in other channels. But crypto behaves differently and we recognized a strong reliance on retail investor sentiment as a price driver. One that is both significantly more impactful than in other industries, and much easier for us to track and analyze on the web.

Crowdsense helps users make money by providing them with the earliest, high-quality information about the retail sentiment on crypto.

Some of our users use the web and mobile application to know about risks to their portfolio or when the crowd starts to talk negatively and widely about an asset they own, they can recognize it and react. Some other users don't want to miss out on opportunities (FOMO = Fear of Missing Out), so they subscribe to social media spikes, events, and influencer posts that we analyze and detect in real-time. Some other users only want a one-stop-shop to see the most popular recent events and metrics regarding certain tokens they own or intend to buy.

Another offering we provide is an API for institutions, which provides the layer of real-time social media data to algotrading. Since we've seen in our analysis the predictive nature of our comprehensive early signals, we recently enabled a paid API offering for market makers, brokers, trading platforms, hedge funds, and the projects themselves.

How is it changing the market?

Crowdsense changes the way people trade and adds a third domain that predicts prices. Up until now, there were only two ways to analyze assets before buying or selling. One is fundamental analysis, and the other is technical analysis. Social media and the rise of retail traders created a new predictor, for which there is no great solution that is as comprehensive or early as Crowdsense. For crypto, social media is the new fundamental, and Crowdsense allows users and organizations to seize the value of social media and find the needles in the haystack in order to decide how to manage their crypto wallets.

In the next few months, we’ll be launching our own trader solution that will allow people who do not want to run the analysis themselves to rely on a social sentiment bot which our testing predicts will greatly outperform the market.

How big is the market for the product and who are its main customers?

The crypto market is the financial sector with the highest growth in the past year. It includes tens of thousands of tokens for crypto projects. The market cap of crypto is worth trillions of dollars. It grows at a rate of 600% year over year, and there are already hundreds of millions of investors in crypto worldwide. Crowdsense’s main customers are retail traders with the need for more real-time and more coverage that allows them to have an edge vs. others. The additional customers are institutional players seeking strategies to protect their portfolio and seize opportunities, each one in its own ways. The market is also growing and more and more institutions that were "on-the-fence" are starting to introduce crypto as part of their asset management, first for the large-cap tokens, and we believe that this is just the beginning. Also, the metaverse where all transactions will be done through crypto to buy NFTs will just continue to fuel the growth of this space.

Does the product exist already? If not - at what stage is it and when is it expected to hit the market?

The product is already in the market and has already 40,000 users from all over the world. We launched its freemium version both as a web app as well as a mobile web app, and we plan on launching the premium plan very soon. Over time, we plan on expanding our intelligence offer towards a full-fledged trading platform with automated trading bots to allow users to also trade through us (or our partners) or to allow the trading bots to do the work for them. In the meantime, users are invited to subscribe to the app and start using the early signals from here. If you are an institutional trading firm or anyone else interested in the API and not the app, then it is available for subscription from here.

Who are the main competitors in this sector and how big are they?

Most of the players in the social media analysis space are focused on other domains such as corporate intelligence or the public sector. For crypto specifically, there are just a couple of players that raised a Series A round. Crowdsense's main difference is pivotal, and it is that Crowdsense listens to everything on Twitter or other social networks, while the other players mainly focus on a subset of the sources in social networks, which gives them less coverage and delayed results, as compared to Crowdsense. In fact, when we did benchmark tests against potential other players including these two players, we realized that we are able to detect more signals much earlier than anything else they provided.

What is the added value that the founders bring to the company and the product?

The founders of Crowdsense have more than 20 years of experience each in the software field across technology, product, and business development. The experiences as hands-on contributors as well as executives in startups and corporations help us in this journey to build a great company with the intent to make an impact in the hottest field.

What will the money coming in from the round be used for?

Crowdsense raised $1,500,000 so far from Techstars, Barclays, the founder of WIX, and capital markets angels from Europe and Israel. We are now raising another $2,000,000 to help us expand the team with more developers, a full-time head of business development, and a head of marketing. We also plan on using the funds to grow to more than 1 million users and get to 6 digit monthly recurring revenues. And our main goal is to transition our current data analysis product towards our vision to become a social media-based trading platform with automated trading bots where people can allow the platform to trade for them based on our premium signals.

In the "Startup Boarding Pass" section, CTech will cover the (relatively) small investments made in companies during the early stages of their existence - and the entrepreneurs and startups who have not yet had the opportunity to reveal their stories to the world. Please use the linked form and fill it out according to the guidelines. This form is intended for startups raising between $500,000 and $3 million from venture capital funds, angels, or official grants from Israeli and foreign institutions. If relevant, someone at CTech will be in touch for follow-up questions.