Benzinga: The Invisible Data Layer Powering Schwab, Fidelity and More

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Andrew Lebbos, who is the SVP of Data Licensing at Benzinga. So if you didn't know, Benzinga is a financial media and data technology platform focused on delivering actionable news, market insights, trading tools, and real-time historical market data. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Andrew, learn about how Benzinga powers some of the most popular retail trading platforms like Fidelity, Schwab, etc., and a little bit more. All right, let's get going.

Hello, hello! Welcome to the show, Andrew. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure, my pleasure. Yeah, I know we had Tommy Cotter from your colleague from Benzinga about a month ago. He was talking to us about APIs and whatnot, which was really awesome, and I'm ecstatic to continue the conversation with yourself, as I know Benzinga, like we mentioned in the open, is kind of all over the place, maybe that people don't realize. But yeah, I guess before we get into all that good stuff, would you like to give an introduction about yourself?

Yeah, happy to. And thanks for having Tommy on. Tommy and I are like Shaq and Kobe, so we're running and gunning together. My name is Andrew Lebbos. I am the SVP of Licensing at Benzinga. For people that don't know, Benzinga is a financial media company and we sell data to a lot of the brokerages that you know and love. Your 401(k) provider probably has data from us. I have been in startups since I graduated college—a couple successful ones, a couple unsuccessful. I found joy in intrapreneurship, especially in this role at Benzinga. Building from within a reputable brand has been awesome. Personally, I love real estate, I love basketball, and I love poker.

Awesome. And yeah, obviously with the Shaq and Kobe reference, you've got to love basketball. Awesome, man. And yeah, just curious, what kind of drove you into the startup and tech scene? Have you always had a love for technology?

Yes, for sure. So when I was in school, I went to Wayne State, a university in downtown Detroit. And when I went there, it was rough in Detroit. Detroit had its bankruptcy in 2011, and then there were concerted efforts to improve the city. Our university, the Honors College, was very involved in it. So while going to school, I was super engaged and excited about the turnaround in Detroit. One thing that was lacking in the city was internet, which the majority of major cities across the globe take for granted—fiber lines, Wi-Fi everywhere, etc. There were some dead spaces in the city of Detroit that didn't have access to good internet whatsoever. This was before Starlink, of course. Rocket Mortgage, now (was Quicken Loans), they were investing a ton in the city, and they funded a startup called Rocket Fiber to build fiber internet lines throughout the city when there was construction being done on major roads. They'd throw a fiber line under and start connecting businesses. I was like, 'Wow, what a great way to advance a city.' I studied economics, and people talk about utilities historically like electricity and water, but they don't really talk about internet, and internet is like water for developing a city. I fell in love with the project, joined the team, they got acquired by Everstream, and then Benzinga became the coolest startup in Detroit. I had gone to events at Benzinga throughout college—the office was a mile and a half south of my university—and whenever they had trader events or speakers, I'd stop by. A job opened up, I played poker with someone running the non-profit at Benzinga, he let me know they were hiring, I applied, and fell in love with financial data. I've been at Benzinga for seven and a half years, got acquired in 2021, and been working through a lot of market cycles and market changes. It's been a really fun, engaging, dynamic journey.

Yeah, certainly sounds like it. I didn't know Benzinga was acquired, that's pretty cool. Once you guys got acquired, did you see a radical shift in your day-to-day from regular startup hecticness to maybe a bit more mellow or go-with-the-flow kind of thing?

Yeah. So I joined in 2019, and there were probably 30 employees—I think I was employee 34. Then COVID happened, and we did some major cuts, the majority of the in-person events team, just rational, smart decisions made by management at the time to protect what we built. We got down to like 18 people. Then the retail trading boom happened—everybody got their COVID check and wanted to trade, all these brokerages popped up, everybody wanted to read about what was happening in the market, crypto was having its first public heyday. When your uncle starts talking about it at Thanksgiving, that's how you know! It was one of those mania times for crypto. We were at the forefront because we write content in a way that's easy to understand for everyone. So we absolutely exploded—10x'd our employee count, grew exponentially from mid-2020 to 2022. During that time we got acquired, and it was run-and-gun, a little disorganized because there was so much business going on in our space and it was so new. We were turning down partnerships and deals! Then after the acquisition, we began to professionalize. You find market fit, grow exponentially, turn into a scale-up, and then there are different issues. In 2019, we were productizing our data suite, figuring out endpoints to build. Then it was: can we support 300 clients instead of 30? Do we have a support team? The CEO can't answer the phone for support tickets after client number 50. Our private equity firm, Beringer, did a great job bringing in 'adults in the room' for specific functions with specific backgrounds. It helped me as a professional, helped our company professionalize and streamline processes. It felt like I've worked at four or five different companies: pre-COVID, COVID, early acquisition, post-acquisition, scale-up. It's never a dull day.

Yeah, I can imagine. Even working in the tech industry now with AI booming and stablecoins booming, every 2-3 months feels like a year. But if you enjoy what you're doing, it's hard to compete with someone who has fun with what they're doing at their job.

For sure. If you like that mental stimulus... Some people want to clock in and clock paper, and sometimes I'm jealous of them, frankly, but that's just not how I'm wired. Prediction markets came out of nowhere, private markets are starting to have a time with OpenAI and Anthropic pre-IPO share situations. The brokerage space is navigating that, AI use in brokerages, AI for data, AI investing... every day it's something different, and I love it.

100%, man. Thank you so much for giving us the history behind Benzinga and all the transitions it went through. I'd be very keen to hear your elevator pitch of the company today. I know you want to share your screen and give a demo.

Yeah, I'm happy to. I haven't done one in a while since we have a strong sales team, so cut me some slack if I'm rusty! Can you see my screen?

I can, yes. You're good to go.

All right. What we're looking at now is benzinga.com. This is what people know us for—a breaking news media site. We get about 18 to 20 million visitors per month on our site to read and understand what's happening in the market. We write in a way that's easy to understand for everyone: 500 to 1,000 words, no acronyms, what happened, why it's important, what happens next. In 2011, TD Ameritrade bought Thinkorswim, and Thinkorswim wanted to be the first retail platform built like an institutional platform. They said, 'Your content is exactly what we need, can we put your news in our platform?' That sparked our licensing business. Then competitors like TradeStation and TradeZero joined, and as we built relationships, we realized the data sets we used to produce our news were valuable to partners as individual data feeds. We had writers aggregating analyst ratings from sell-side banks, upcoming IPOs calendars, company logos, etc. We broke those into separate products. In 2019, we had 6 or 7 products; now we have over 30 API endpoints—everything you'd need for a stock's details page to increase engagement, decrease churn, and acquire users. We build towards what our customers need. The end user consuming our data is the user on Robinhood or similar platforms—people like you and me. So we ask our partners, 'What are your users asking for?' They asked for conference call transcripts, so we built it. They wanted Nancy Pelosi's trades, so we built Government Trades API. Tommy and his tech team produce a product a quarter. Many legacy competitors are built on systems from the late '90s, whereas our tech built from 2015 onwards is modern, dynamic, and native to integrate easily.

I love that. That's the way to conduct a business—see what your clients want rather than building what you think they want. Being SVP of Data Licensing, you've grown that portfolio to around 400 clients. I'm curious about your go-to-market strategy and challenges while scaling.

Happy to discuss it. I take a non-traditional approach because I came from a sales background. I still stay involved from a sales and account management perspective for a few key client accounts to keep my finger on the pulse of what's working and what clients want. I feel managers who aren't interfacing with clients lose touch. Most of my day is working with the team—we have 5 full-time salespeople based across the globe (APAC, Europe, US) with specific specialties like AI, APAC, or institutional. On Tommy's side, he runs product, engineering, and support, so we work hand-in-hand. We just hired someone for marketing—if you check our LinkedIn, you'll see new branding and a sleek new website rolling out soon. We're also doing more personalized, smaller client events, like a World Cup watch party in London or a Nets suite event, to connect with clients in fun ways while discussing business needs.

That's great to hear. You touched on the AI side, and with AI booming, we're seeing a lot of disinformation campaigns on social media. Since you're a news data aggregator, what kinds of things have you been doing to combat misinformation?

When AI hit the scene in a commercial way, we were pretty nervous about it—thinking it would write news faster/better than us or standardize data sets. But it's actually been a great upside surprise for Benzinga for a few reasons. Because of all the content 'slop' and misinformation everywhere, people are looking for reputable, honest, objective sources they can trust. We'll never just pump out AI garbage; we have a newsdesk team of 55 people who have direct relationships with sell-side banks, company CEOs, and industry experts to produce engaging, informative content that AI cannot produce on its own. Furthermore, AI models need objective source content! Because of how we built our endpoints and newsfeed, many AI models are licensing our content directly to power their answer engines with a reputable source, avoiding hallucinations or scraping ambiguous sources like Reddit or sponsored links. For financial data, where stakes are high, LLMs are licensing our content. It was our biggest growth segment last year, which we didn't even budget for. AI also aligns with our core mission: democratization of finance. AI lets retail investors ask tailored questions about earnings or market data and receive answers suited to their understanding level.

Fantastic answer! As we're at time, I wanted to ask one more question: could you share anything on the roadmap planned for the rest of the year?

Please visit benzinga.com/apis and sign up for our newsletter, or add me on LinkedIn (Andrew Lebbos). We're adding finishing touches to conference call transcripts, which has been super popular with AI companies needing full transcripts. We launched a Prediction Markets newsfeed because everyone wants to know how odds affect holdings in traditional markets, as well as a Private Markets newsfeed for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. That's our responsibility: to inform our readers.

Amazing! All those details will be in the description below. Thank you so much, Andrew, for taking the time out of your busy day to chat with us. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for having me, Narb. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure anytime. Wish everybody a happy Friday and happy weekend, and we'll catch you back here in a couple weeks for another episode of DevNTell. Until then, have a good one folks! Cheers.