Two Sigma Acquires Hivemind

Two Sigma, a financial services company focusing on data-driven quantitative investing, has announced the acquisition of Hivemind Technologies’ software platform to strengthen its data-handling capabilities. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2001, New York-based Two Sigma combines rigorous inquiry and data analysis with a variety of technological methods, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and distributed computing, to inform its trading strategies. The company claims its data-driven approach helps solve the toughest challenges in the investment management and venture capital space. It gets over 20 petabytes of data from more than 10,000 sources every year and currently has more than $60 billion in assets under management. Meanwhile, Hivemind Technologies, headquartered in London, is an IT consultancy that combines automation of its platform and distributed human intelligence to create valuable, bespoke datasets from messy or unstructured sources. The platform aims to bring control and efficiency to data processing, making it more auditable and accurate. With this deal, Two Sigma plans to enhance the data preparation, data workflow, and machine learning capabilities of its data engineering platform. The company said it will integrate Hivemind’s offering to glean the ability to distill semi structured and unstructured data sources into high-quality, machine-readable datasets. Ultimately, the integration will amplify Two Sigma’s ability to ingest data quickly and utilize it more effectively for investment decision-making. In fact, the company has been at it for years, working to embed greater efficiency and accuracy into various aspects of its data pipeline, from cleaning to mapping to creating unique datasets.