Waiker announced on October 4th that it has entered into an exclusive Proof of Concept (PoC) contract with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to provide AI data services based on Large Language Model (LLM) to global investment banks, including Citi, HSBC, and Nomura. Starting from the fourth quarter, Waiker’s data services will be gradually supplied to LSEG’s global clients through the PoC contract.

Founded in 2020, Waiker has developed AI NLP (natural language processing) models specialized in stock market data that accurately and swiftly convert target data from global companies’ various disclosures, investor relations, and news articles into its databases. Previously, Waiker entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Refinitiv, the world’s second-largest stock market data production and distribution company, now a subsidiary of LSEG. The startup has undergone technological verification for 15 months to validate its AI data extraction, accuracy, speed, and performance.

Waiker CEO Elvin Hwang stated, “The contract signed with LSEG stipulates that target data from disclosures, news, and reports within the digital environment will be processed with AI and conveniently provided according to the demands of potential clients, including securities firms and asset management companies.” He added, “LSEG currently has over 40,000 clients, which implies that the product supply will be targeted towards these clients.”

Over years of extensive R&D on NLP, Waiker has gained recognition for its potential within specialized fields compared to general-purpose LLMs. Company disclosures including business contracts, management decisions, M&A, and changes in beneficial ownership are unstructured, typically centering on text and including numbers and facts, thereby causing irregularities and ambiguities. Compared to data stored in database cell formats or annotated data within documents, it is nearly impossible to analyze and collect this information in one’s database through simple crawling or scraping.

Therefore, the added value of such data is significant when utilized by securities and asset management industries, resulting in annual cost expenditures of hundreds of thousands of dollars per corporate client. Waiker AI will provide data according to client demand, automatically analyzing and datafying unstructured information into various languages including English and Korean, via over 7B training data.

Waiker anticipates that the PoC and joint business contract will serve as a catalyst for its global revenue growth. The collaboration between LSEG and Waiker’s specialized Large Language Model (sLLM), which can datafy unstructured information of listed companies in major stock markets including the United States, India, Japan, China, and South Korea, is expected to establish global presence and serve as an opportunity to enhance mutual benefits for both companies.