Arjun Sethi speaks with the arrogance of somebody who knows greater than other people, or else who knows that sounding highly confident can shape perception. Either way, when he tells me over Zoom that “in five years, I’ll have 50% of the world’s private data” at his fingertips, and that it’s going to be “inconceivable to compete against me,” he says it with all of the authority of Warren Buffett dropping stock market truths.

Sethi, a co-founder of the enterprise firm Tribe Capital, is talking about Termina, a subscription-based AI software platform for “quantitative diligence” that Tribe more recently spun out and which Sethi says can improve results for as many investors as he can enroll. Yet the mere prospect raises questions. Namely, if Termina is so good, why are Sethi and Tribe giving other investment firms a solution to higher compete? Relatedly, why should other investors trust Termina, which ingests its customers’ data to enhance over time?

First, it’s price learning more about Termina itself, which soft launched last month with two products. At a high level, one in every of those products is a dashboard that goals to assist investors quickly gauge the health of any company by comparing it across the businesses in Termina’s initial proprietary dataset grows with every recent customer that Termina secures. The second offering is designed to assist investors understand external forces at play, including expected market changes. Consider Termina as “providing you with the ability of 1,000 associates,” says Sethi.

Sethi declines to reveal early customer names, but he says they include pension funds, sovereign funds, and personal equity funds, all of which he collectively characterizes as a “large class of capital deployment folks who wish to stay under the radar.”

What he’s happier to debate are his ambitions for the business, whose biggest starting advantage, says Sethi, is transactional data on roughly 1,500 firms that Termina has fed into a couple of large language model (that Sethi declines to call), together with an LLM that he says Termina has itself created to boost investors’ benchmarking capabilities.

To leverage the tool, Termina’s customers also give the outfit their very own raw data. “They may be using it for M&A, so a personal equity firm will dump their very own data [into it] and the identical is true of every other VC firm,” he says. What that software spits out, ostensibly, are comparison datasets of firms that exist “across the board, across all stages,” says Sethi, who calls Termina, which was founded just six months ago – the “true Bloomberg of personal markets.”

Naturally, some will scoff on the prospect of Termina handling a lot sensitive data, which is every firm’s most precious resource. This will prove doubly true given Termina’s ties to Tribe Capital.

Still, he dismisses such concerns. For one thing, he says, Tribe invests in seed- through Series C-stage firms and appears for venture-like returns. Termina, meanwhile, “is enabling anybody in any asset class to give you the chance to take into consideration how you can invest into software firms, no matter stage, so it’s two very different strategies.”

Sethi – who sold an earlier company called MessageMe to Yahoo, then worked with VC Chamath Palihapitiya at his firm Social Capital before co-founding Tribe – also suggests he has the popularity needed to drag off what he’s attempting.

“A part of it,” Sethi says of persuading other investors to make use of Termina, “is you only inherently construct a number of trust over an extended time period.”

We’ll see. Actually, one can see each the benefits and drawbacks of Termina’s close relationship with Tribe, which owns a stake in Termina. (Termina has thus far raised barely greater than $10 million, including from Sethi personally.)

A team that has long worked together is one advantage, for instance. Along with Sethi – who stepped down as Tribe’s CEO last December, assuming the role of chairman and chief investment officer as an alternative to focus partly on Termina – the seven-person startup includes others who split their time between Termina and Tribe.

Amongst these is Alex Chee, who cofounded MessageMe with Sethi, joined him at Social Capital, and subsequently co-founded each Tribe and Termina with him. Chee oversees Termina’s day-to-day operations; he can also be still Tribe’s chief product officer. Jake Ellowitz, one other Termina co-founder and, for a short while, a Social Capital worker, is Tribe’s CTO.

Conversely, Tribe itself is fairly young and has yet to actually prove itself. The 30-person outfit boasts a powerful $1.6 billion in assets under management already, but it surely was founded just six years ago. It has enjoyed some success from investments in crypto tokens, but its other investments have yet to exit and the trajectory of a few of those bets is unclear, highlighting the bounds of quantitative evaluation. Take Carta, the cap table management company that has come under fire for tactics that some see as questionable, or Bolt, the one-click checkout company that was buzzy until it wasn’t.

It’s also price noting Termina’s clients aren’t agreeing to share their data with the outfit exclusively, so if someone’s black box is best, Termina could possibly be toast.

Again, Sethi shakes off talk of challenges. “The explanation why we exist and why customers work with us is that now we have one of the best data on the planet, and now we have one of the best product. We don’t have any specific patents. All the pieces we do is trade secrets. And our tool just isn’t 10x higher than what’s on the market; it’s, like, one thousand times higher than what people’s existing workflow looks like.”

As for what meaning for Tribe, he apparently has greater ambitions now. “My whole goal is that as one enterprise firm, I could only accomplish that much. As an organization, I can just do this far more.”