Built from Frustration

After spending over a decade in quantitative investment research, our founder had experienced every frustration the financial data industry could offer. Vendor contracts that required six-figure annual commitments. Data that looked clean until you actually tried to use it for backtesting. APIs that felt like they were designed in 2005 and never updated. Point-in-time data that wasn't actually point-in-time. Support tickets that went into a void.

The countless hours spent cleaning data, reconciling discrepancies between vendors, and building workarounds for broken APIs—it was time that should have been spent on actual research. Time that represented real opportunity cost for investors trying to generate alpha.

The final straw came during a critical research project. A major data vendor's "point-in-time" fundamentals contained look-ahead bias that had silently corrupted months of backtesting results. When confronted, their response was a shrug and a suggestion to "adjust our methodology."

That was the moment the decision was made: if the established players weren't going to build what quantitative professionals actually need, we would build it ourselves. From the ground up. With no legacy baggage. No shortcuts.

Synapse Discovery was engineered by practitioners, for practitioners. Every design decision was informed by real-world experience: the data structures that make backtesting straightforward, the API patterns that developers actually want to use, the true point-in-time architecture that eliminates look-ahead bias by design rather than as an afterthought.

We built the platform we wished had existed. Clean, standardized fundamentals parsed directly from SEC filings. Price data with proper corporate action adjustments. Holdings data for thousands of funds. Institutional 13F positions. All accessible through a modern API that respects your time and intelligence. All at a price point that doesn't require a committee meeting to approve.

Financial data has been gatekept for too long. The same data that multi-billion dollar hedge funds use shouldn't require multi-million dollar budgets to access. Our mission is to democratize institutional-grade financial data—making it accessible to independent quants, developers building the next generation of financial tools, and AI systems that are reshaping how we interact with markets.

We believe that when you remove the friction between researchers and data, breakthrough insights happen faster. We believe that a solo developer in their apartment should have access to the same data quality as a Manhattan hedge fund. We believe that the future of finance is being built by people who refuse to accept the status quo.