A startup company in Kitchener is now working with about 200 sample clients to test software that could revolutionize the way people analyze publicly traded companies.

Silqe – the second financial technology startup co-founded by CEO Ben Bittrolff – has developed software that lets the user quickly and easily extract data from all financial statements filed with regulators in the U.S.

Yep, ALL financial statements.

If the closed beta test is successful, Bittrolff and his team hope to do an open beta test later this summer and launch the product before the end of the year.

“We’re Google Search for finance,” said Bittrolff in an interview last week. “One aspect of it is there is nothing good out there that does what we do. People are able to cover a large really data set.”

Silqe – pronounced the same as “silk” – is one of 10 companies now going through Communitech’s Rev accelerator, which focuses on improving revenue for seed-round companies.

Bittrolff and his team previously formed a startup in Toronto called Cyborg Trading Systems, whose algorithms helped stock traders to automate their trading systems. It was bought by a Toronto investment house last year for an undisclosed price.

Bittrolff, who has an MBA in finance, wanted to stay in the FinTech segment so the team turned their attention to a platform that would help investors quickly customize searches of company financials.

As it stands now, Silqe’s automated system goes through every public filing in the U.S. and extracts key data from the financial statements. (It will eventually apply to any company that uses Gaap or IFRS accounting standards.) It collects raw data, which is one of the program’s strengths. Users can then go to the dashboard and quickly perform searches with their own criteria.

They could, for example, look up all tech companies with more than $300 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2015. Then they could compare the findings to the previous first quarter and see growth patterns emerging. Then that could divide the number of shares into the findings, and see earnings-per-share performance. These searches would take seconds.

Silqe includes an application program interface, or API, which means it can work with the IT systems of its clients. What it doesn’t have yet is a visualization feature that allows for charts and graphs. Bittrolff said that will come in later versions.

Because Silqe deals with raw data from the financial statements, it gives the user the bare numbers on a company’s performance. That’s important, but companies frequently present the best numbers possible in the written portion of a statement.

“There are all sorts of nuances in a financial statement,” said Bittrolff. “And if you try to lump it all into a proprietary data base you have to make a judgement call, and that isn’t always appropriate.”

The Silqe team is now mid-way through the closed beta test, and hopes to complete the open beta and launch by the time Rev wraps up in the fall. When Silqe launches the product, it plans to target investment boutiques as the first clients because they would probably make the fastest decisions to buy. Then the team will move on to the larger blue chip financial houses.

For now, it’s focused on working with the 200 beta customers, who comprise a range of traders, analysts, and other professionals.  Their response has been enthusiastic – so much so that they’re already asking for new features.

“One says wouldn’t it be cool if it could do this, and another wants it to do that,” said Bittrolff. “We’re busy filtering out the noise and remaining focused on our technology road map.” 

Eye on KW is a regular feature on Entrevestor, focusing on the startup community in Kitchener-Waterloo.