When it comes to financial investments, data holds the key to success — but turning data from multiple sources into actionable insight can be a tall order. 

Alquant, a Swiss fintech and quantitative asset manager, aims to solve this problem. The company has a clear mission: to remove the technological barriers in asset management and bring investment ideas to market faster. Its complete platform covers everything from initial quantitative research to client-ready products for reporting, seamlessly connecting investment strategy creation, management and distribution. 

We talked to Alquant’s Co-Founder and CTO, Valentin Moullet, about his exciting startup and the role Snowflake plays in helping achieve its goals. 

How would you explain Alquant in a single sentence?

Alquant is a Swiss fintech transforming how investment strategies are created, managed and distributed.

What inspires you as a founder?

I’m inspired by the intersection of rigorous science and real-world application. Coming from an engineering and academic background at EPFL in Switzerland, I’ve always loved complex problems. But I didn’t want the solutions to just sit in a research paper; I want to see them at work creating real value.

As a co-founder of a company, you have a chance to see your ideas become a reality. At Alquant, this means helping investors preserve capital through smart algorithms, automating tedious workflows and creating software that allows users to intuitively explore investment products. 

What problem does Alquant solve?

In 2018, we started Alquant as a quantitative asset manager, and we struggled to do a lot of things that we thought should be simple. Things like developing strategies based on quality data, managing them daily and presenting them to clients and prospects intuitively.

We built internal tools to solve these specific headaches, and after receiving requests from industry peers, we decided to open our platform, white-label those tools and offer them to others facing the same challenges. Today, we are both an asset manager and a software provider, effectively acting as our own most demanding client. 

How does Snowflake fit into the Alquant stack? What role does it play?

Snowflake is our central nervous system. It’s at the heart of everything we do with data.

As a lean team of just three data engineers, we can’t afford a dedicated database administrator or complex DevOps. Snowflake acts as our single source of truth. It continuously ingests data throughout the day, stores it securely and makes it instantly available to our quantitative researchers and our client-facing applications. 

What’s the coolest thing your company is doing with data?

The industry we’re in is full of noise; there are lots of data sources, some more trustworthy than others, that you have to derive insights from. 

Every strategy we build is powered by massive data sets from diverse sources, and we engineer those into smart yet accessible products. The coolest part is the alchemy of it, taking those complex, noisy data points and distilling them into sound investment strategies that anyone can grasp. 

How does Snowflake enable you to push the envelope in your line of business?

Snowflake provides us with “zero ops” scalability. In the past, running complex quantitative models on these volumes of data would have required heavy on-premises infrastructure or a nightmare of SQL maintenance. With Snowflake, we can focus our energy on algorithms and our IP software, not the plumbing behind the scenes. We don’t need to think about things we don’t want to think about. This allows our small team to manage a range of investment products for many, many clients at a speed traditional banks simply can’t match. 

As a founder and innovator, what is your take on the rapidly changing AI landscape? How will it change what Alquant is able to do?

AI isn’t new at Alquant. Quantitative finance is a natural partner of AI, and we’ve explored machine learning for signal generation since Day 1. However, generative AI is certainly transforming how we communicate data.

We envision a future where we don’t just provide our clients with charts but give them an interactive, AI-generated narrative that explains, for example, why a portfolio was rebalanced. This will bridge the critical gap between “black box” math and human trust. 

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you got about how to run a startup?

It’s a cliché for a reason, but “Do things that don’t scale, until you have to.” 

Initially, we tried to automate everything perfectly. However, we learned that you often need to manually onboard those first few clients to truly understand their pain. Until you understand them, you can figure out and deliver 80% of your product. With the last 20%, you should leave room to adapt as you learn.

Once you have more clients and more visibility, you can begin to understand the best ways of working. Being flexible at the start is important, and you can tackle scaling later on. 

What one lesson did you learn the hard way?

I always thought that the best tech or best idea would get the most recognition and win business. In reality, the best distribution is often what makes the difference. 

We initially spent too much time perfecting our models, assuming results would speak for themselves. In the end, we learned that we needed to spend more time thinking strategically about how we get people to know about our solutions. 

When you envision the future of your industry, where do you see Alquant?

I see Alquant becoming the go-to partner for launching, managing and distributing investment products. We want our risk engine and data infrastructure to power the portfolios of banks, pension funds and family offices. We aim to be the invisible layer that makes investing safer and in general more interesting for investors and managers. 

Learn more about Alquant at www.alquant.com. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Snowflake for Startups program for info on how Snowflake can support your goals.