LuxSE acquires major stake in Luxembourg start-up Tetrao

26/01/2021

LuxSE acquires major stake in Luxembourg start-up Tetrao

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE) today announced the acquisition of a 22.8% stake in the Luxembourg-based technology company Tetrao International. Tetrao powers its technology with artificial intelligence to provide data services including document, websites and information handling. LuxSE is the first financial institution to invest in Tetrao, a move that reflects its decision to make data a core part of its growth strategy.

Using robotic cognitive automation, Tetrao’s technology simulates human behaviour to identify, read and understand complex information from websites and documents. Through its integrated solution, Tetrao enables companies to save time and costs currently spent on manual, error-prone and time-consuming processes.

“Data will only grow in importance going forward. The challenge is to find ways to collect and classify this massive amount of data through scalable automation. We are convinced that our industry needs data solutions that combine technology and human interactions to deliver quality, speed and scale, and this is precisely what Tetrao provides. This is a strategic investment for the exchange, as data will drive our future growth,” commented Robert Scharfe, CEO of LuxSE.

Incubated in the Luxembourg eco-system

Tetrao was created in Luxembourg in 2014 and is a member of the Luxembourg House of Technology. In 2017, Tetrao won the BNP Paribas International Hackathon, where 160 fintechs competed for the prestigious prize. The following year, Tetrao was selected among 1,800 fintechs across Europe to be included in the list of the 10 Most Promising Fintechs in Europe, the so-called Hot 10 2018, established by Fintech50. These successes are testimony to the highly qualified team at Tetrao, notably thanks to its partnership with the École des Mines de Nancy.

Tetrao started its commercialisation in 2017, and since then, the start-up has opened offices in France and Spain and has recently grown to 25 employees, with ambitious plans ahead.

“Artificial Intelligence is only in its first stages of deployment in the industry. It has great potential to change the way we work with data, improving dramatically both quality and time to market. Thanks to the backing of LuxSE, Tetrao has the means to become a key leader of the AI-driven economy in Europe and is able to tackle new challenges,” stated Christian Gillot, CEO and Founder of Tetrao.

AI-powered data collection

Tetrao is currently working with LuxSE to further develop its strategic LGX DataHub. In just 3 months, Tetrao has collected 350,000 sustainability data points from 385,000 document pages. Tetrao manages the data collection in collaboration with LuxSE’s sustainable finance experts, who validate the quality of the data. The LGX DataHub was last year’s flagship development at the sustainability-focused exchange and was launched in September 2020.

In 2019, Tetrao launched an R&D project for the investment fund industry that collects daily documentation and relevant metadata on 85,000 instruments of the fund industry. In this context, Tetrao has entered into a strategic alliance with Fundsquare, the wholly owned subsidiary of LuxSE, and a leading service provider to the fund industry. By combining Tetrao’s technology with Fundsquare’s market infrastructure, the two parties are working to enlarge Fundsquare’s data scope, creating new features and services and enabling scale.

Betting on tech start-ups

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange is following the technology start-up landscape closely. In 2019, the exchange acquired stakes in Luxembourg-based start-up Startalers and London-based fintech Origin. Last year, LuxSE further increased its investment in Origin as other shareholders joined in a new funding round. The exchange is also one of the founding shareholders of FundsDLT, which completed its series A funding round in 2020.

The LuxSE Group is composed of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE) the leading listing venue for international securities and Fundsquare, its wholly-owned subsidiary specialized in delivering to the fund industry an efficient and standardized infrastructure for the exchange of information.