About Us

Founded in 1922, Weeden & Co. has a long history of investing in software companies, including Instinet, Autex, Quotron, QV Trading, Intralinks, 17a-4, dTech and others.  Weeden continues the tradition of developing start-up and early-stage opportunities in the financial, regulatory and technology space.

Venture Investing

We have been very successful when something has changed, such as a regulation or technology. For instance, we launched dTech to assist filers with the then-introduced EDGAR system; we launched 17a-4, LLC when the SEC decided that emails must be archived as required by SEC Rule 17a-4; and we were first-round investors in Intralinks when technology changed the model that everyone had to be in a conference room to close deals.

We are not a large fund, so we don’t typically succeed if we have to compete with entrenched players.  However, we can move quickly if an opportunity fits our venture model.

The investments and companies below represent the type of investments we prefer and have been successful for both the management teams and our fund.

 

Intralinks

Though we didn’t start Intralinks, we were the first investors in what became the leading platform for bank loan syndications and other types of financial transactions. What changed, is that technology had developed to the point that parties no longer had to be in a conference room working endless hours to negotiate a transaction. Instead, technology became the ‘conference room’ and allowed hundreds of institutions to participate in a complex transaction. Intralinks went public and was then sold to SS&C.

dTech

The SEC was creating the EDGAR system which requires that financial institutions and corporations file electronically rather than flying messengers to DC to file. We went to one of the first public meetings to see if / how we might be involved. It didn’t look promising until I sat next to Scott Theis in the afternoon session. Scott, a talented programmer, had developed software that would convert proportional fonts to non-proportional fonts. This may not seem like a significant software tool until you realize that virtually all complex financial tables are created in fonts like Times Roman. Exporting a Times Roman table into courier creates a mess of crooked columns. We started dTech and wrapped Scott’s code into a filing software tool called EDGAREase. As filers were required to file, EDGAREase quickly became the preferred tool for most EDGAR filers and gained over 50% of the EDGAR software market. We sold dTech to Wolters Kluwer in 2001.

Primex

Primex was the creation of Christopher Keith’s Exchange Lab. The concept was to add an auction facility upon the Cincinnati Stock Exchange’s CLOB. The Primex feature would allow institutional orders to be exposed to market markers to bid on orders which could not be filled by the orders in the limit book.
Other firms besides Madoff who were involved in Primex include Goldman, Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley. Our investment was profitable when Primex was sold to NASDAQ. Even though the SEC gave permanent approval to Primex, the NASDAQ closed it down in January, 2004.

AMLShare

With two partners, Weeden founded AMLShare, a platform for financial institutions to share information about financial transactions with complete anonymity. We developed the platform when the US Treasury issued new requirements that suspicious activities be reported with a SAR filing.  The Treasury and many financial institutions reviewed the platform and liked the concept, but we could never gain sufficient market share.  See FinCEN

17a-4

Weeden founded 17a-4, LLC when the SEC decided that Rule 17a-4 covered email records in 2001.  At that time, email had just emerged on Wall St., and platforms included Hotmail, AOL, CompuServe, and several others.   17a-4 remains a portfolio company and provides two offerings: Electronic compliance records consulting. See SEC Rule 17a-4(b)(4)

However, 17a-4’s DataParser is the leading independent software tool to capture content from platforms like Bloomberg, Symphony, ICE, MSFT Teams, Cisco’s Webex, Salesforce’s Slack, Zoom, ServiceNow, LivePerson and many other collaboration platforms.  We feed content from these platforms into MSFT’s 365, Google Vault, Proofpoint and 30 other compliance platforms.  See Microsoft Third-Party Data Connectors

Working with us

We are focused on the area represented by these investments. As such, if you have a concept, we can provide funding and a network of industry contacts that will jump-start your company. Unlike other venture firms that invest in a wide breadth of industries, we focus on our niche and use our contacts and market understanding to build seaworthy companies.

Contact Us