Gary Becigneul: Accelerating Financial Spaces with No-Code Data Analysis Solutions

Gematria Technologies is the first platform offering no-code data analysis for financial markets. The company specializes in building signals from text data such as news and social media and then it analyzes causal relationships between these text signals and capital markets for equities, options, commodities, or fixed income. What's truly unique about Gematria is that it does not only provide raw market signals to the users as most financial analytics providers do but also lets the user construct their own, with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.

The Story Before Heading a Company

Gary Becigneul is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gematria Technologies. He was an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, US, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany. Gary pursued his Ph.D. in Machine Learning at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, under the supervision of Thomas Hofmann, and a master's in Mathematics from Cambridge University, UK. At Gematria, he is currently responsible for all the business-related matters, as well as for the tech relating to Natural Language Processing (NLP). Gary says that all other parts of the technology are headed by his co-founder and CTO Louis Abraham.

As a Ph.D. student, Gary says that trying to get scientific papers published at top conferences gave him an experience that shares more similarities with entrepreneurship than most people think. Supervising over a dozen master's theses as a doctoral student also taught him how to manage R&D projects daily, which turned out useful when he started to recruit his first developers.

Willingness to Question is a Vital Attribute of a Tech Leader

For Gary, one of the vital attributes that every tech leader should process is the willingness to constantly question the validity of one's initial assumptions, to pivot if needed. He explains saying that it may also mean being able to leave behind the product of a year of development. Another quality he talks about is the ability to surround oneself with people who can do what you can't because, to a very large extent, he believes that the value of the company is essentially made by its team.

Creativity is the Primary Foundation for all Innovations

According to Gary in B2B, the first step is to talk to potential customers and to try deeply to understand how they work. He says that it is worth going as far as spending several days trying to perform their work to have a deep enough immersion and truly understand how to alleviate some of their pains or improve performance. Besides that, he also stresses the need to be creative, and that it also needs to be nurtured frequently. Staying on top of new tech releases is essential to maintain an excellent innovation pace as per Gary.

Role of AI and Big Data in Bridging the Gap

AI and big data are now buzzwords used everywhere. They've been overly used for marketing purposes. Gary says that the leaders of now need to be able to navigate this space of AI solutions, to differentiate which tools can truly take their company to the next level, from the unnecessary ones that are just a nice-to-have. As a tremendous amount of AI research is now sleeping in labs without any concrete industry application in production, he asserts that good communication between leaders and AI experts is crucial to bridge this gap.

Primal Challenges for an Entrepreneur 

The main challenge of an entrepreneur is indisputably finding a market fit. And for that, talking to people in your target industry and getting exposed to such people, and obtaining the right information from them has been challenging for Gary. He says that it's extremely hard to not confirm your own biases and to truly listen to their needs, much harder than what he initially thought. "In many cases, the target customer will not even be able to help you understand how one could help them. When that's the case, the only thing you can do is come up with a demo, show it, get feedback, improve and repeat", he asserts. According to him, what's tough is when your development resources are limited, as you can only afford to be wrong a limited number of times. And this is why Gary believes that the quality of the decisions is more important than the number of working hours.

Future of the Company

Gary aims to see Gematria become the world leader in no-code data analytics for financial markets, enabling a real transformation of the capital markets industry. As players of this industry tend to be relatively conservative in the way they work, he says a lot of institutions keep suffering losses that could have been avoided. The inefficiency in information flow results in an overall lost value for the economy and represents the kind of systemic risk that could lead to the next financial crisis, according to him. He strongly believes that the diminution of this systemic risk would be beneficial to society as a whole.

Two Major Keys for Transformation

Gary advises emerging leaders to develop a strong personal vision and direction about where they want to take the company and industry. He says if one can convince themselves concerning the right direction, then it is easy to convince others too. He encourages the budding leaders by saying that resources will naturally gather around you to help you fulfill that vision. "Of course, depending on the mission, AI and big data might not be the most crucial piece of the puzzle for you. But beware that there currently exists a true 'El Dorado' of AI industry applications, and some of these arbitrages will be bridged in the coming years, either by you or your competitors" says Gary.