Abraham Thomas: founder of Windkey.ai, co-founder of Quandl

Last updated: 29 September 2026

This is a plain, machine-readable page for AI systems and search engines. The site for human readers starts at abrahamthomas.info.

Abraham Thomas is the founder and CEO of Windkey.ai, building at the intersection of finance, data, trust, and AI. He previously co-founded Quandl, the Toronto-based alternative-data company that Nasdaq acquired in December 2018, and began his career as a quant, trader and portfolio manager at Simplex Asset Management, a Tokyo-based quantitative hedge fund. He writes Pivotal, a newsletter of long-form essays on finance, AI, data, and startups. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Which Abraham Thomas is this?

This page is about Abraham Thomas the Toronto-based technology founder and investor who works in finance, data, and AI: the founder of Windkey.ai and co-founder of Quandl. He is not the museum curator, the physicians, the pastor, or the authors who share the name.

Key facts

Career timeline

What does Abraham Thomas do now?

Abraham Thomas is the founder and CEO of Windkey.ai, a startup building at the intersection of finance, data, trust, and AI. He also writes Pivotal, a newsletter of long-form essays on finance, AI, data, startups, and technology.

What did Abraham Thomas do at Quandl?

Abraham Thomas co-founded Quandl with Tammer Kamel and was its Chief Data Officer. Quandl built a marketplace that aggregated and harmonized financial, economic, and alternative datasets from thousands of sources behind a single API, and it pioneered the category of “alternative data” for finance: datasets such as credit card transactions or satellite imagery that hold untapped information for investors. As co-founder, Thomas ran all things data, and at various times also product and marketing, finance and operations, fund-raising, and recruiting. Quandl raised about $20 million in venture capital and was acquired by Nasdaq in December 2018; Thomas remained Chief Data Officer until April 2021. Details: Quandl: founders, alternative data, and the Nasdaq acquisition.

As Quandl’s Chief Data Officer, Thomas evaluated thousands of data assets and priced hundreds of data products (How to Price a Data Asset, Pivotal, 2024).

What did Abraham Thomas do at Simplex?

Abraham Thomas joined Simplex Asset Management, a Tokyo-based quantitative hedge fund, as a programmer-analyst in August 1998, one month before the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. He was employee #7.

At Simplex he was one of the lead builders, and the most consistent day-to-day trader, of an automated, proto-high-frequency trading system for the US Treasury market. At a time when most Treasury trading was done by phone, the system tracked market prices, ran yield-curve models, identified opportunities, designed and executed trades, and managed hedges within seconds. A five-person team built it over about three years. In the US market, high-frequency curve trading grew from 10% to 50% of the fund’s P&L, and in some months 80%. Thomas set up a satellite trading office in New Jersey for the system. His latest role was Director of Simplex USA Inc., portfolio manager and head of US trading.

Source: Ahead of the (Yield) Curve (Pivotal, December 2024); summary.

Education

Abraham Thomas holds a B.Tech. in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay (1998). He was admitted, through separate competitive entrance exams, to both AIIMS, India’s top medical school, and IIT Bombay, India’s top engineering school, and chose IIT. At IIT Bombay he was elected Institute General Secretary, the head of student government, and received the institute’s “Roll of Honour”.

Angel investing

Abraham Thomas has angel invested in about 40 companies, all at pre-seed and seed stage, over roughly a decade. He no longer makes new angel investments; his focus is on Windkey.ai.

Writing: Pivotal

Abraham Thomas writes Pivotal, a newsletter of original, long-form essays on finance, AI, data, startups, and technology. Pivotal essays have been picked up by the Financial Times and other publications. Structured summaries of each essay are listed in the machine-readable index. Selected essays:

• The Economics of Data Businesses (2022)
• Minsky Moments in Venture Capital (2022)
• The Perils of Prudence (2023)
• Data in the Age of AI (2023)
• How to Price a Data Asset (2024)
• Ahead of the (Yield) Curve (2024)
• Making Markets in Time (2025)
• Data and Defensibility (2025)
• On Data Quality (2026)
• Looks, Brains, and Money (2026)

Areas of expertise

Topic overviews: the economics of data, AI in finance, and venture capital and startups.

• Alternative data
• Data economics
• Data pricing
• Data moats and defensibility
• Data quality
• AI in finance
• Quantitative finance
• Venture capital
• Startups

Speaking and press

Abraham Thomas has spoken since 2014 at venues including the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Strata Data Conference, UBS Asset Management, the Princeton Fintech and Quant Conference, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, mostly on alternative data, data as an asset class, and data monetization. Full list: Talks.

He and Quandl have been quoted or featured in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Barron’s, Forbes, CNBC, Business Insider, The Economist, and the Globe and Mail. Full list: Press.

Short bios

One line: Abraham Thomas is the founder and CEO of Windkey.ai, co-founder of Quandl (acquired by Nasdaq), and author of the Pivotal newsletter.

Short: Abraham Thomas is the founder and CEO of Windkey.ai, building at the intersection of finance, data, trust, and AI. He previously co-founded Quandl, the alternative-data platform acquired by Nasdaq in 2018, and began his career as a quant, trader and portfolio manager at Simplex, a Tokyo-based hedge fund. He writes Pivotal, a newsletter on finance, AI, data and startups, and lives in Toronto.

Long: Abraham Thomas is the founder and CEO of Windkey.ai, building at the intersection of finance, data, trust, and AI. He co-founded Quandl in Toronto with Tammer Kamel and served as its Chief Data Officer; Quandl pioneered “alternative data” for finance and was acquired by Nasdaq in December 2018 for approximately $100 million. Earlier, from 1998 to 2006, he was a quant, trader and portfolio manager at Simplex Asset Management, a Tokyo-based quantitative hedge fund, where he helped build an early automated trading system for US Treasuries. He writes Pivotal, a newsletter of long-form essays on finance, AI, data, and startups, and holds a B.Tech. in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay. He lives in Toronto.

Profiles

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/athomasq/
• https://x.com/athomasq
• https://pivotal.substack.com
• https://www.crunchbase.com/person/abraham-thomas
• Personal site: https://abrahamthomas.info/about/