What began as a hobby for twins James and Christopher Kardatzke during their college years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has, in just five years, matured into a profitable financial technology company with over $2 million in annual recurring revenue.
The brothers co-founded Quiver Quantitative — an investment research platform with a website, app and downtown Madison office space in the Urban Office Co. building — to make hard-to-access data more readily available to seasoned financial professionals and aspiring retail investors alike.
In particular, Quiver targets younger generations that CEO James Kardatzke said are often “underserved” by larger platforms like Yahoo Finance.
“There are definitely not as many companies out there in our space that are really going after the younger investors,” he said.
With three rounds of venture capital investment totaling $2.5 million — and plans to stay lean as it grows — the company is positioned to expand its base of paid subscribers, which consists of individual investors as well as other companies looking to use Quiver datasets.
“Our goal is to really over time become established as one of the leading investment research providers for retail investors,” James Kardatzke said. “We want to be a one-stop destination that has everything people need.”
The inspiration behind Quiver Quantitative stemmed from an internship James Kardatzke held at a hedge fund in Boston, where he worked on a team collecting datasets on how medical devices were performing in the field.
“A lot of this data was obviously super useful for understanding how stocks were going to perform and how things were going to happen in the market going forward,” he said. “And a lot of this data wasn’t available to the general public in any way where it would be easy for people outside of the hedge fund and institutional space to really access and make use of it.
“So Chris and I basically realized there’s an opportunity to build out a site that would … make it easy for average people to have high-quality investment data and use it.”
While initially the Kardatzkes balanced the startup with their studies — James in finance and economics, and Christopher in statistics with a certificate in math — they put the word out about Quiver through a few investment forums and said the rapid traction it gained on social media changed their plans.
“That was kind of when we realized that there might be an opportunity to do it as a full-time business,” said James Kardatzke.
Working as siblings hasn’t been an issue, Christopher Kardatzke said.
“It’s been pretty smooth. James handles a bit more of the business side of things, and I’d say I handle a little more of the tech side of things, but we both have a bit of a hybrid role where we’re working on a lot of different facets,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a startup, so everyone wears a lot of different hats.”
One of the business’ primary hurdles has been creating a product that is useful and comprehensible to users with varying levels of experience in investment research.
With “retail investors as a whole,” James Kardatzke said, “it’s a very wide spectrum in terms of what people are coming in with, in terms of investing knowledge, in terms of data knowledge.
“One of the big challenges is finding a way to design the site that really works well for people across the entire spectrum, where people on the higher end don’t feel like they’re getting a dumbed-down, simplified version of everything, and people on the low end don’t feel like everything’s just too complicated for them to understand.”
Users can find datasets on Quiver’s website and app covering a wide variety of topics on trading activity. That information includes congressional stock trading, or personal stock trading by members of Congress and their families; insider trading, where corporate executives or board members trade their own company’s stock in accordance with SEC guidelines; hedge fund activity and more. Quiver users can then draw from that information to make their own informed trading decisions.
“Many of these datasets allow our users to track how the wealthy and powerful are managing their own money, and give them the tools to replicate those insiders,” said James Kardatzke. “Our goal is to empower more retail investors to use data to guide their trading.”
Quiver’s s social media content has also helped attract a younger user base.
“A big part of the story of our growth has been being able to find social media channels that get content in front of people, where we can make data interesting to them and make it accessible in a way that it wouldn’t be if we just threw a big spreadsheet at them with a whole bunch of numbers they don’t understand,” said James Kardatzke.
The social media marketing strategy that proved so effective in the company’s infancy will continue to be a priority, the Kardatzkes said, with platforms like Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and TikTok continuing to help Quiver grow its millennial and Gen Z user base, all while the company steadily scales up its staff and broadens its datasets.
“We share a lot of the work that we do on social media, and we’ll see other people using something that I’ve put time into building, giving feedback, suggestions,” said Christopher Kardatzke.
By May 2020, Quiver had raised its first round of VC funding, led by the Idea Fund of La Crosse. That investor also led its second round, and Allos Ventures its third.
Other key investors have included the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Lancaster Investments, Alumni Venture Group and Connetic Ventures. At this point, the Kardatzkes said, it’s unlikely another round will be necessary.
“We definitely never came in with a philosophy that we needed to raise really big funding rounds and go out and scale and scale and scale and burn a ton of cash in order to do that,” said James Kardatzke. “So we’ve always tried to keep operations very lean.”
That mindset helped Quiver reach profitability by 2024, which he said has taken “a lot of the pressure off.”
“You don’t need to worry about your cash dropping every month. You’re actually growing your cash, which is nice,” he said. “We’re really focused on continuing to sustainably scale up our revenue and scale up our profitability.”
Around 75% of the company’s revenue comes from paid subscriptions to its website. The site has 750,000 registered users who can access its free content, and over 5,000 pay $30 per month for its premium tools.
The other 25% of Quiver’s revenue comes from its B-to-B side.
“That’s mostly through what’s known as our API (application programming interface). … We can license out our datasets to anyone who wants to either build their own products on top of them or do deeper research and back-testing of the data,” said James Kardatzke.
He tells companies, “You pay us … (each) month, and you can get access to that data and the license to do whatever you want with it.”
Quiver has attracted roughly 500 such clients so far.
On the technological front, the company’s goals are centered around enhancing the app and continuing to increase the scope of Quiver’s datasets.
“Historically, our mobile app has kind of lagged behind our website in terms of how nice it is to use and how many features there are,” said Christopher Kardatzke, “so in the last couple of months, we’ve been putting a lot of effort toward starting to make some improvements there.”
He also said Quiver is looking to beef up its data in a different area: election tracking.
“In the past, we’ve done some pretty basic stuff looking at different candidates’ funding sources and things like that, but I think we’d like to start doing more with polling data and data on prediction markets for different congressional races to try to do a better job of forecasting which way the midterms are going to go.”
Those improvements are planned for spring 2026.
“What I find really rewarding is building things and seeing other people use them,” said Christopher Kardatzke. “That’s something I hadn’t really had much experience with up until now. You can go through school, and you’re doing all these projects and things which are getting graded, but it’s not really something that is being continually put to use.
“(I) just like seeing that it’s something other people are interested in and care about.”
