A former Point72 exec's new data startup hopes to strip away big funds' deep-pocketed advantage

• Carbon Arc, a startup from former Point72 executive Kirk McKeown, launched Thursday.
• The data platform allows small funds and businesses to purchase data by the megabyte, sometimes for less than $1.
• The startup raised $55 million, and its backers include former celeb agent Michael Kives' K5 Global.

Carbon Arc is hoping to level the playing field.

The new company, which is the brainchild of former Point72 data wizard Kirk McKeown, aims to upend how data is sold and structured by making it cheaper and more accessible to anyone looking to use data to trade or feed AI models.

The startup, which already has dozens of vendors and buyers on the platform, launched publicly Thursday but had been building in stealth for years, ever since McKeown left billionaire Steve Cohen's Point72 in 2021.

If the company progresses as its cofounder hopes, it will eliminate one of the biggest advantages mega-funds like McKeown's old employer have: Their deep pockets.

Carbon Arc offers anyone — small asset managers, local businesses, AI bots — structured, private data at a reasonable price. Buyers, including asset managers, healthcare systems, and the NHL's Florida Panthers, purchase the datasets they want and pay by the megabyte. The total price can be less than $1, and McKeown expects that to continue to drop as more buyers come onto the platform.

The goal, in part, is "making the competitive advantage not whether or not you can afford it", said McKeown in an interview with Business Insider. Instead, users can focus on "what you can do when you have it."

"Who does better work with the same dataset" will become the differentiator, he said, adding that it brings "creativity and skill" back to different industries.

Data budgets in the asset management industry have soared for the biggest hedge funds, with top players spending millions a year on both vanilla market data and exotic alternative data that tracks different metrics using phone geolocation data and satellite images. A survey of 60 alternative data buyers last year by consultancy Neudata found that managers, on average, were spending $1.6 million on alt data — with plans to increase their budgets.

While the elimination of trading commissions for equities has allowed individuals and niche asset managers to trade stocks cheaply, the price of data has allowed the biggest firms to hold an insurmountable information advantage.

McKeown, a tattooed alum of Harvard and MIT's Sloan School of Management, said the venture "didn't start out this mission-driven, but it's become a little bit of that." He raised $55 million from investors such as former Boston Celtics co-owner Jim Pallotta's Raptor Group and former Hollywood agent Michael Kives' K5 Global.

McKeown sees the growth of AI as another area where the firm can set itself apart.

As AI models hoover up all available public data, these cutting-edge companies will need access to cheap, private data to continue to grow and learn.

McKeown believes Carbon Arc can fill that need, in part because it structures the datasets for sale on its platform in an easily digestible way.

"We think we are a financial services business selling data structure," McKeown said.

His lofty goal for the company: "Ubiquitous access to data from Carbon Arc."