An analyst running a consumer discretionary book needs to test whether reported sales momentum is showing up in card spend, and whether competitors are diverging. They want the company-level breakdown, the one that tells them whether Target's deteriorating revenue trend is playing out in the actual transaction data, and whether Dollar General is holding up in the same environment or diverging. Getting that signal today involves too many steps.
The data lives in a vendor portal, and exporting it means reformatting it, cleaning it, and doing entity resolution by hand. When the vendor updates its methodology, the old dataset breaks and the analyst is on the phone with a support team trying to figure out what changed and how to pull a consistent series going forward.
There's no good reason this workflow should be that slow. The friction is the cost of how data has traditionally been bought and managed: bulk contracts, opaque methodology updates, and no standard way to compare one data asset with another.
Carbon Arc fixes this by mapping different data assets to the same company identifier, so an analyst can compare card spend, web traffic, app usage, and other signals without manual entity matching. Firms get on-demand access to structured, normalized data assets at the entity level, without the contracts, without the cleanup work, and without the methodology surprises.
And it's now available on the OpenBB App Marketplace.
What is Carbon Arc
Carbon Arc is building the infrastructure for the AI economy where composable, queryable, and monetizable primitives can be built and used for inference, agents, and decisions. With their seamless onboarding process, you can get access to 210+ data assets for $20/month within minutes. No lengthy sales cycle or annual contracts.
What holds it together is the ontology layer underneath. Every data asset on the exchange resolves to the same entity identifiers, so credit card spend data for Target and app-install data for a competing retailer share a common key. You can put them on the same chart without building a cross-reference table first. The ontology also handles reinstatement: when Carbon Arc updates how an entity is represented in the data, your historical series carries forward and the framework gets refreshed to the new structure, rather than breaking silently and requiring a repurchase.
Carbon Arc covers over 210 data assets, and every data asset arrives pre-structured with a consistent schema. The time between pulling data and charting it is as short as it should be.
Carbon Arc also runs its own MCP server that can integrate with OpenBB Copilot, which means you can research and analyze Carbon Arc's data through natural language. Ask OpenBB Copilot about credit card spend trends, foot traffic, or any of the 210 data assets Carbon Arc covers, and the data comes back structured and ready for analysis.
Carbon Arc data inside OpenBB
Inside the OpenBB Workspace, Carbon Arc is available through the Carbon Arc Pro Workspace app.
Framework Manager
Once you’ve connected an API, the Framework Manager table shows every framework you've purchased through the Carbon Arc platform or API. It doesn't include frameworks pulled through MCP conversations, those live in the chat itself.
A note on the status column: when Carbon Arc updates an entity representation in its ontology, frameworks that reference the old structure are flagged as needing reinstatement. You see that here, on the row, before your charts break.
Update Framework
When a framework is flagged, the Update Framework widget surfaces it with a one-click reinstatement action. Carbon Arc handles the mapping from old ontology to new and preserves the historical series. Click Reinstate, then refresh the Framework Manager to see the updated status.
Charting Widget
Use the charting widget to visualize your purchased frameworks or connect Carbon Arc's MCP server to OpenBB Copilot and ask, "Can you get me WMT credit card spend for the last two years?" and it returns the full monthly series, formats it into a table, and builds a chart widget on the dashboard from one prompt.
Expand your work within the charting widget. Pull the same series for a second company, ask for both on one chart, and Copilot merges them. If looking to compare growth, ask copilot it to normalize the series so the trends are comparable or rebase the index to whatever date matters for the analysis. Use the chart settings to realize the full toolset and export the data or image for presentations.
If you haven’t connected an API key yet, the first tab gives you a live preview using demo data assets (a credit card spend series and an app-usage series across fictional companies), so you can see what you'd be getting before you buy. You can also browse the Data Library inside the Carbon Arc platform for the full list of available data assets.
Real workflow example: tracking company performance
In March 2026, Quince announced a $500 million Series E at a $10 billion valuation, more than double the $4.5 billion valuation from barely a year earlier. For many, it was quite the surprise to see such a huge valuation for a clothing company.
Through Carbon Arc, users can purchase data assets covering both private and public companies. For Quince, an analyst can purchase a panel credit card spending and website traffic data and bring both into the Carbon Arc app in OpenBB. The data can be viewed as is, or the analyst can ask OpenBB Copilot to combine physical and online spending into a single series and normalize it alongside website traffic.
The result is a clear growth story that had been developing largely behind the scenes. Card spending more than doubled year over year in every quarter from Q1 2025 through Q1 2026, while full-year 2025 spending was roughly twice the prior-year level. Website traffic supported the same story, growing severalfold and reaching record levels during the 2025 holiday season. The traffic surge came first, followed by a sharp increase in spending.
The next question is whether Quince can sustain that pace at its new valuation. Using OpenBB to create a growth-rate chart on card spending, we see it remained up roughly 116% year over year in Q2 2026. However, growth moderated through the quarter and came in slightly below Q1. That is not yet evidence of a meaningful slowdown. Spending is still growing at a triple-digit rate against increasingly difficult comparisons. But it makes the second half of 2026 the next important test of whether Quince is still accelerating or beginning to normalize.
Get started
- Open the OpenBB App Marketplace and connect to the Carbon Arc app
- Sign up for an account at CarbonArc.ai and explore the platform to buy frameworks and obtain your API key. Use code OPENBB30 to get your first month free.
- Add your API key to the CarbonArc App in OpenBB (if you've purchased one, find it here)
- Purchase frameworks on CarbonArc.ai (Builder or API), then return to the Workspace tab where they will appear automatically.
- Connect the CarbonArc MCP server to the Workspace for expanded analysis (Name: CarbonArcMCP / Remote MCP Server URL: https://mcp.carbonarc.ai)
