Wikinvest Closes $2.5 Million For Investment Wiki

wikinvest_logo.jpgWikinvest has closed a $2.5 million series A led by DCM and including angels. Wikinvest is just as the name suggests, a wiki for investors.

Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia.

Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data.

They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example).

All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization.

Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts.