Kraft
Crafting the future of financial services
Introduction
Kraft was started by two ex-PwC colleagues that became friends. Henk and Sheldon came together in 2020 through a common problem they faced in their respective teams in how to enable quants, actuaries and financial engineers to realise scalable value out of their advanced quantitative modelling capabilities without needing to upskill in software engineering. We set out to build a data science platform, now called ARQ Apps, that gives these individuals software engineering superpowers and generate immense value for our clients.
2 1/2 years later with an ARR of >$1m and a team of more than 10 employees ARQ Apps is a successful and scaling business.
While we are very proud of our work and thankful to our firm, our ambitions are much larger, and different, to that of the firm in which ARQ Apps lives. Henk and Sheldon thus decided to start Kraft to realise our full vision.
Problem
Building powerful, scalable and trustworthy quantitative models and integrating and deploying them in a structured manner sits at the core of quantitative modelling teams throughout financial services. Quantitative finance builders do not, and should not, have extensive software engineering expertise to quickly and scalably share their knowledge and insights. They however don't have the tooling to do so and either waste time doing software engineering or spend time painfully handing it over to a separate team for implementation and integration.
Furthermore, senior management already struggles to control enterprise model risk in understanding their own model landscape, data flows and modelling methodologies. Models sit within silo'd and opaque code repositories and their results are communicated through static presentation decks or one-way static dashboarding tools at most.
In the age of an exploding network of high value but highly complex AI models, enterprises are either forced to throttle the adoption of emerging technologies to manage risk or face the chaos and risk of proliferating models making decisions within their organisation which they cannot monitor across their organisation.
Opportunity
Kraft is a unified, collaborative data science platform connecting quantitative finance builders, analysts and decision makers. Kraft combines a tailored quant development and deployment environment with a model structuring and monitoring layer. This enables builders to effectively harness the latest technologies to build powerful robust models while allowing management to have real-time oversight and interaction with the outputs of all the models in this environment.