Arjun Sethi speaks with the boldness of somebody who knows greater than other people, or no less than knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception. Either way, when he tells me over Zoom that “in five years, I’ll have 50% of the world’s private data” at his fingertips, and that it’s going to be “not possible to compete against me,” he says it with all of the authority of Warren Buffett dropping stock market truths.
Sethi, a co-founder of the enterprise firm Tribe Capital, is talking about Termina, a subscription-based AI software platform for “quantitative diligence” that Tribe recently spun out. Sethi says it may well improve results for as many investors as he can join. Yet the mere prospect raises questions. Namely, if Termina is so good, why are Sethi and Tribe giving other investment firms a technique to higher compete? Relatedly, why should other investors trust Termina, which ingests its customers’ data to enhance over time?
Termina was founded just six months ago and soft launched last month with two products. One is a dashboard that goals to assist investors quickly gauge the health of any company by comparing it across the businesses in Termina’s initial proprietary dataset, combined with the shoppers’ own data. The second is designed to assist investors understand external forces at play, including expected market changes. Consider Termina as “providing you with the ability of 1,000 associates,” says Sethi.
Sethi declines to reveal early customers’ names, but he says they include pension funds, sovereign funds, and personal equity funds, all of which he collectively characterizes as a “large class of capital deployment folks who need to stay under the radar.”
He’s happier to debate his ambitions for the business. Its biggest starting advantage, says Sethi, is transactional data on roughly 1,500 corporations that Termina has fed into multiple third-party large language models (Sethi declined to call them), together with an LLM that he says Termina has itself created to reinforce investors’ benchmarking capabilities.
To leverage the tool, Termina’s customers also give the outfit their very own raw data. “They may be using it for M&A, so a non-public equity firm will dump their very own data [into it] and the identical is true of another VC firm,” he says. What that software spits out, ostensibly, are comparison datasets of corporations that exist “across the board, across all stages,” says Sethi, who calls Termina “true Bloomberg of personal markets.”
Some will scoff on the prospect of Termina handling a lot sensitive data, which is every firm’s most precious resource. This may occasionally prove doubly true given Termina’s ties to Tribe Capital.
Sethi dismisses such concerns. For one thing, he says, Tribe invests in seed- through Series C-stage corporations and appears for venture-like returns. Termina, meanwhile, “is enabling anybody in any asset class to have the opportunity to take into consideration the best way to invest into software corporations, no matter stage, so it’s two very different strategies.”
Sethi – who sold an earlier company called MessageMe to Yahoo, then worked with VC Chamath Palihapitiya at his firm Social Capital before co-founding Tribe – also suggests he has the fame needed to drag off what he’s attempting.
“A part of it,” Sethi says of persuading other investors to make use of Termina, “is you only inherently construct loads of trust over a protracted time period.”
We’ll see. Actually, one can see each the benefits and downsides of Termina’s close relationship with Tribe, which owns a stake in Termina. (Termina has to this point raised barely greater than $10 million, including from Sethi personally.)
A team that has long worked together is one advantage, for instance. Along with Sethi – who stepped down as Tribe’s CEO last December, assuming the role of chairman and chief investment officer as an alternative, to focus partly on Termina – the seven-person startup includes others who split their time between Termina and Tribe.
Amongst these is Alex Chee, who cofounded MessageMe with Sethi, joined him at Social Capital, and subsequently co-founded each Tribe and Termina with him. Chee oversees Termina’s day-to-day operations; he can be still Tribe’s chief product officer. Jake Ellowitz, one other Termina co-founder and, for a short while, a Social Capital worker, is Tribe’s CTO.
Conversely, Tribe itself is fairly young and has yet to prove itself. The 30-person outfit boasts a powerful $1.6 billion in assets under management already, however it was founded just six years ago. It has enjoyed some success from investments in crypto tokens, but its other investments have yet to exit, and the trajectory of a few of those bets is unclear, highlighting the bounds of quantitative evaluation. Take Carta, the cap table management company that has come under fire for tactics that some see as questionable, or Bolt, the one-click checkout company that was buzzy until it wasn’t.
It’s also price noting Termina’s clients aren’t agreeing to share their data with the outfit exclusively, so if another person’s black box is best, Termina could possibly be toast.
Again, Sethi shakes off talk of challenges. “The explanation why we exist and why customers work with us is that we now have the very best data on the planet, and we now have the very best product. We don’t have any specific patents. All the things we do is trade secrets. And our tool will not be 10x higher than what’s on the market; it’s, like, one thousand times higher than what people’s existing workflow looks like.”
As for what meaning for Tribe, he apparently has larger ambitions now. “My whole goal is that as one enterprise firm, I could only accomplish that much. As an organization, I can just do this far more.”
