Quandl: founders, alternative data, and the Nasdaq acquisition
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Quandl was a Toronto-based platform for financial, economic, and alternative data, co-founded by Tammer Kamel (CEO) and Abraham Thomas (Chief Data Officer). It pioneered the category of “alternative data” for finance and was acquired by Nasdaq on 4 December 2018 for approximately $100 million. Nasdaq later rebranded Quandl as Nasdaq Data Link.
Key facts
| Founded | 2012, Toronto, Canada |
|---|---|
| Founders | Tammer Kamel (CEO) and Abraham Thomas (Chief Data Officer) |
| What it did | A data marketplace and API for financial, economic, and alternative data, used by investment professionals |
| Funding | About $20 million in total: a $5.4 million Series A led by August Capital; a $12 million Series B led by Nexus Venture Partners, with August Capital participating; and about $2.6 million from angel investors and smaller funds across pre-seed, seed, and venture rounds |
| Acquired by | Nasdaq, 4 December 2018 |
| Price | Approximately $100 million. Terms were not officially disclosed; BetaKit reported in 2025, citing a source familiar with the deal, that Quandl sold for over $100 million. |
| Today | Part of Nasdaq, rebranded as Nasdaq Data Link |
Who founded Quandl?
Quandl was co-founded in Toronto by Tammer Kamel and Abraham Thomas. Kamel was chief executive; Thomas was Chief Data Officer. Both came from quantitative finance: Kamel had worked as a risk manager, quantitative analyst, and portfolio manager at several hedge funds, and Thomas had been a quant, trader, and portfolio manager at the Tokyo-based hedge fund Simplex Asset Management. Both stayed on at Nasdaq after the acquisition; Thomas remained Chief Data Officer until April 2021.
What did Quandl do?
Quandl solved a well-known problem: the world holds an enormous amount of valuable data, but it is fragmented, hard to find, and hard to use. Quandl built technology to aggregate and harmonize millions of datasets from thousands of sources into a single data marketplace with a uniform API. Investment professionals could reach the data from Python, R, Excel, and other tools.
Quandl’s alternative data was used by a majority of the world’s top hedge funds, asset managers, fintechs, and investment banks:
| Date | Scale and customers | Source |
|---|---|---|
| February 2018 | 250,000 users downloading 10 million datasets daily; clients included seven of the world's 10 biggest quant funds and 14 of the 15 largest banks | Forbes Fintech 50, 2018 |
| June 2019 | More than 30,000 active monthly users; used by eight of the world's top 10 hedge funds and 14 of the 15 largest banks; more than 350 datasets on the platform | WatersTechnology, 2019 |
What is alternative data?
Alternative data is data that holds information useful to investors but does not come from traditional financial sources such as exchange prices or company filings. Examples include credit card transactions, satellite imagery, emailed shopping receipts, shipping sensors, auto-insurance records, and corporate aircraft movements (used to anticipate mergers). Investors use it to see economic activity earlier, or in more detail, than traditional data allows.
How did Quandl pioneer alternative data?
Quandl pioneered the category of “alternative data for finance”: datasets of great value to professional investors that had previously been unused, and often unknown. It found such data, evaluated it, turned it into products, and sold it to financial institutions. As Quandl’s Chief Data Officer, Abraham Thomas evaluated thousands of data assets and priced hundreds of data products.
The category grew quickly. By the time of the acquisition, the number of alternative-data vendors tracked by AlternativeData.org had more than tripled over a decade, to 375 (Financial Times, December 2018). The rise of alternative data, and Quandl’s part in it, was covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Barron’s, CNBC, Forbes, and others. See Press below.
Thomas’s essays on the economics, pricing, and defensibility of data draw directly on this experience: The Economics of Data Businesses (2022) and How to Price a Data Asset (2024).
Why did Nasdaq buy Quandl?
Nasdaq bought Quandl as part of its expansion beyond exchange trading into data and technology, then growing, higher-margin businesses. It planned to combine Quandl with the analytics hub in its Global Information Services division. Nasdaq said Quandl would help it “partner more closely with the investing community as the industry continuously seeks ways to evaluate an endless supply of information to drive new insights, investment ideas and deliver alpha” (Bjørn Sibbern, head of Global Information Services, quoted in the Financial Times). Sibbern later told WatersTechnology that “Quandl was such an obvious acquisition for us because of its leadership in the alternative data space.”
Awards
- Forbes Fintech 50 (2018), which called Quandl “a powerhouse in what’s being called ‘alternative data’”.
- Best Alternative Data Provider, Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 (WatersTechnology).
- Acquisition of the Year for Nasdaq’s acquisition of Quandl, Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 (WatersTechnology reader vote).
What happened to Quandl after the acquisition?
Quandl became part of Nasdaq and was later rebranded as Nasdaq Data Link. Abraham Thomas remained its Chief Data Officer until April 2021. He went on to write the Pivotal newsletter and, in 2026, founded Windkey.ai.
Press coverage
- Nasdaq moves into ‘alternative data’ with Quandl acquisition — Financial Times, 4 December 2018 (pdf)
- Nasdaq Dives into Alternative Data — Barron’s, 2018 (pdf)
- Acquisition of the Year: Nasdaq’s acquisition of Quandl — WatersTechnology, June 2019 (pdf)
- Wall Street’s Insatiable Lust for Data — Wall Street Journal, 2016 (pdf)
- Data: The Next Frontier — Financial Times, 2016 (pdf)
- Making Millions from Data — CNBC, 2017 (pdf)
- Big Data and the Future of Wall Street — Forbes Fintech 50, 2018 (pdf)
- How Alternative Data is Changing Investing — Barron’s (pdf)
- Quandl is Investors’ Secret Weapon — Financial Post (pdf)
- The Data Game — Globe and Mail (pdf)
- The Extraordinary Rise of Alternative Data — Pivot Magazine, 2019 (pdf)
- Antler Canada adds former Quandl CEO Tammer Kamel — BetaKit, May 2025 (reports the sale price)
More coverage: Press.