The power of the open source software movement is how it harnesses the collective power of many developers to solve a shared problem. Raghav Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of startup Smartkarma, is looking to apply that same sense of collaboration to remake the investment research market.
Historically, investment research was a service that rolled up into a department within a bank. Analysts would work in a siloed environment, producing their own insights and sharing with a very select group of readers. Smartkarma was founded on the idea that to increase the quality of research, you need to open up the process to be collaborative, instead of siloed. Per Kapoor, “Our team believes we’ve created a fundamentally different model of how to produce investment research. Inspired by the open-source software community, Smartkarma puts a focus on collaboration, creating a peer-review process that leads to better, more accessible analysis.”