Alpha Vantage

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The founders started Alpha Vantage as a side project during graduate school, motivated by a shared interest in stock markets and investing and a desire to build a tool they would use themselves. They did not initially plan to build a company, but rapid user adoption and heavy usage led them to turn it into a business.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

A graduate school classmate, Lee Lin, who had gone through YC in S09, encouraged the founders to apply and gave feedback on the application and interview. They were accepted after a 10-minute interview at YC's Mountain View headquarters, went through the S18 batch, and pitched at Demo Day held at the Computer History Museum.

How have you kept in touch with the YC community and continued to use YC resources & programs since the batch ended?

Since the batch ended in September 2018, the founders have stayed connected to the YC community through the Bookface internal network and by attending Alumni Demo Days, initially in person in San Francisco and later remotely over Zoom for batches from W20 onward.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

Alpha Vantage began as a project the co-founders built over winter break in graduate school. Its first major turning point came less than two months after launch, when Yahoo Finance shut down its market data API and sent a wave of former users to Alpha Vantage, increasing active users and API queries by over 10x.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders address the limited accessibility of high-quality financial market data, which has traditionally been available mainly to large institutions through providers like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. They note that many modern traders behave more like software developers and prefer API access over closed systems such as the Bloomberg terminal, a pattern reflected in their APIs' adoption and usage.