When the Boston-based FinTech Sandbox held its Demo Day for Wall Street bigwigs in New York last month, there was only one Canadian company presenting, and it hailed from Sydney.
Tanya Seajay, CEO of Orenda Software Solutions, made the presentation before the crowd that included 300 executives from major American financial institutions. [Check out the video.] Within a day, she was fielding inquiries from people in the audience.
“It led to 30 very strong leads and other leads that filled up our pipeline and we’ve been moving quite aggressively to keep our momentum going,” said Seajay in an interview last week.
Orenda set out three years ago to develop a reputation analysis technology that analyzes in real-time the public perception of an organization. As would be expected, it monitors social media but it also looks at such other sources of opinion as traditional media, comment sections, and blogs. Orenda’s technology can place words in their social or cultural context to filter out the ambiguity in online content and get a more accurate understanding of what people are posting.
The technology applies numerical metrics to emotions, connections and associations with the brand, allowing the corporation to understand in real time its reputation with the general public or specific niches.
Sydney's Bid Tasker Plans To Launch Soon.
After winning the Cape Breton region in Innovacorp’s I-3 competition in 2016, Seajay moved to Toronto, where the company was enrolled in the IBM Innovation Centre. She says the move allowed her to be closer to corporate customers, and the company now has operations in both Toronto and Sydney. It is also now working with the MaRS Discovery District to develop its business, and it was accepted into the FinTech Sandbox in Boston.
“What that [the move to Toronto] gave us was greater access to the market, which gave us a greater understanding of the market,” said Seajay. “The market has shifted and we were able to have an understanding of that shift.”
The company is now using its emotion analysis to assess perceptions of publicly traded companies, and other tradable goods like cryptocurrencies. Using this data, Orenda can be used to predict whether the value of stocks or cyptocurrencies will rise or fall. It can cover 12,000 to 15,000 equities and Seajay said the movement of its ratings system is strongly aligned with stock price movements.
The system is also effective in determining how the values of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin will move because so much of their fluctuation is based on sentiment. At the Paris Fintech Forum last year, Seajay met a European institution interested in cryptocurrencies, which led to a pilot in the blockchain-based money.
With eight employees based in Sydney and Toronto, Orenda now has more than 12 customers and is working at signing the companies in its pipeline after the New York event.
As for raising capital, Seajay seems lukewarm on the idea.
“We have not raised funds yet,” she said. “It’s something we were considering as we scaled up. But it’s quite an effort and we are more interested in getting sales from our customers.”