The company’s defining release of 2025 was the OpenBB workspace…
The company’s defining release of 2025 was the OpenBB workspace achieving “Enterprise Readiness” (SOC 2 Type II), which allowed it to penetrate institutional markets. Unlike competitors who act as ‘walled gardens’, OpenBBThe ‘Bring Your Own Copilot’ architecture allows companies to plug their own sophisticated models (for example a ‘Credit Risk Llama 3’) directly into the dashboard. This ensures that sensitive financial analysis takes place securely on the company’s own infrastructure, and not on top of it OpenBB‘s servers.
Core technology: the open terminal and data platform
OpenBB workspace: a modern, web-based terminal that combines charts, news and SEC filings. Unlike Bloombergit is ‘widget-based’, allowing users to drag and drop Python scripts or custom AI agents directly onto the canvas, in addition to standard price charts.
OpenBB copilot: An AI analyst embedded in the workspace. Crucially, it supports Function Calling on the user’s dashboard, meaning that if you ask, “Compare the price-to-earnings ratios of these three stocks,” it doesn’t just guess, but actively pulls the live data from the widgets on your screen to calculate the answer.
Open data platform (ODP): The underlying engine that normalizes data from over 100 providers (such as Fred, Polygon, and Benzinga). It acts as a ‘Universal Translator’, allowing analysts to switch data providers with a single line of code without breaking their models.
Excel add-in: A “Trojan Horse” product that brings the power of Python and AI directly into the spreadsheet, allowing bankers to pull live data and run complex regressions without leaving their native environment.
Company and market status
Market position: Widely recognized as the leading Open Source challenger in fintech. It has captured the ‘Prosumer’ and ‘Quant Developer’ market that finds Bloomberg too rigid and Yahoo Finance too basic.
Community: Boasts one of the largest open-source financial communities in the world, with more than 25,000 GitHub stars and thousands of contributors building plugins for everything from crypto sentiment analysis to dark pool tracking.
Strategy: OpenBB does not try to replace Bloomberg for everyone (a chat/liquidity network is missing); instead, it replaces it with research and data analysis, offering a “good enough” alternative for 1/100th the price (or free).
Company profile
Founder: Didier Lopes (CEO).
Headquarters: Lorton, Virginia (Distributed Team).
Financing: Backed by OSS Capital and angel investors like Ram Shriram (early Google investor).
Main usage scenarios
- Quantitative research: Quantitative analysts use the OpenBB SDK to take data from 50 different sources, normalize it and test a trading strategy Jupyter Notebooks before you deploy it.
- Investment memoranda: Equity researchers use OpenBB copilot to ‘read’ an earnings transcript and automatically extract management guidance from it, populating a structured comparison table with consensus estimates.
- Education and academia: Universities use OpenBB as a free learning tool, giving students access to professional financial data and modeling tools without the huge licensing costs of older terminals.
Why it matters
OpenBB represents the unbundling of the financial terminal. For decades, if you wanted professional data, you had to buy the whole bundle (hardware, chat, data, news). OpenBB proves that in the API economy you can put together a ‘DIY Terminal’ that is cheaper, more flexible and – thanks to AI – always just as smart.
openbb.co | LinkedIn profile
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