OpenBB belongs to everyone
Didier Lopes
Founder & CEO, OpenBB
TL;DR: We are open-sourcing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive open source license
Today is bittersweet.
On December 20, 2020, over the Christmas holidays, I wrote the first lines of Gamestonk Terminal, what would eventually become OpenBB. My flight home to visit my parents had been cancelled because of COVID, so I stayed in London and started building a tool to streamline my own investment research process.
At the time, the idea was simple: individuals (and firms) should be able to own their research platforms. They shouldn't have to adapt their workflows to whatever a data or software vendor decided to build. They should own the entire experience - from the data they connect to, to the interface analysts and PMs use every day, to the APIs, models, skills, tools and AI agents that increasingly form part of the investment process.
Over the last almost six years, OpenBB evolved far beyond anything I imagined when writing those first lines of code. We started as an open-source terminal and went on to build the SDK (now Open Data Platform), the OpenBB Bot, the OpenBB Workspace, the OpenBB Copilot, the Excel Add-in, and an ecosystem of applications created by our team, our partners and the community.
We kept innovating and being at the forefront of what user experience should be. I was prepared to die on the hill that if we were to become the financial infrastructure software for the buy-side and sell-side, then we could not monetize data. Monetizing data would have made us a data vendor. The margins would have been higher, but the incentive would have shifted from offering a better UI/UX to selling more datasets. Selling an infrastructure platform is incredibly challenging, for many reasons. And so we died on that hill. Along the way, we built an incredible community, reached millions of people through our open-source project, worked with some of the largest financial institutions in the world and assembled a team that consistently built far beyond what should have been possible for a company of 10 people. There is a lot to be proud of.
But despite all of that, we couldn't find the product-market fit needed to build a sustainable business around this vision within the time we had.
As a founder, I've always bet the house on the next customer, the next feature or the next launch to change the trajectory of the company. Until even just last weeks, when we announced self-serve Workspace Lite. If we were ever going to close doors, then we never wanted to look back and think "what if".
In hindsight, we could obviously have made different decisions - e.g., surrounding data, or going more vertical with clients and their workflows. But short-term monetization was not something I was prioritizing over where I thought the industry was heading. Ultimately, I wanted us to stand for something.
In the last phase of the company, I explored many paths to give OpenBB a better home. We spoke with larger companies that shared parts of our vision and tried to find a home where the products, and ideally the team behind them, could continue to grow. Ultimately, we weren't able to make that happen.
I left London with my wife to build OpenBB and dedicated almost six years of my life to it. So did the team. We built at the intersection of finance, AI, open source and software infrastructure, often working on problems before they became obvious to the broader market.
Before MCP existed, we had created our own API protocol so agents could interact with the data and analytics widgets in the workspace. In 2023, we built askobb, which let anyone ask investment research questions in natural language that required joining multiple different datasets together.
What this team created deserves to continue existing.
More importantly, I still believe the original vision is inevitable. The future of financial software is not a single platform every firm is forced to use. It is thousands of firms building environments that reflect how they actually work - their own data, internal systems, investment processes, risk models and compliance requirements. Increasingly, their own APIs, MCP servers, models and AI agents too.
If that future is coming, then the technology we built shouldn't disappear simply because we weren't able to commercialize it successfully.
It should become available to everyone.
Today, with the support of the team and OSS Capital, we are committing to releasing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive license. This includes OpenBB Workspace, Open Data Platform, OpenBB Copilot and the OpenBB Excel Add-in.
These products represent over 5 years of engineering, millions of dollars invested in R&D and thousands of decisions, experiments and iterations with users. They will become a foundation that individuals, startups, data providers and financial institutions can freely use, modify and build on top of.
We will share more details about the order and timing of each release as we complete that work. In parallel, we will determine the right long-term structure to steward the projects, support contributors and preserve what made OpenBB special in the first place. Existing customers and users of the hosted products will hear from us directly about timelines.
For the partners who built applications for the OpenBB ecosystem, I hope this decision makes your products even more valuable. You already did the work of turning your datasets and analytics into applications that users can interact with. Now, those applications will be able to run inside infrastructure that firms can fully own, extend and customize, while combining them with data and tools from other providers across the ecosystem.
The same applies to the broader community. Developers will be able to use the entire OpenBB stack as a starting point rather than rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch. Firms will be able to deploy it, adapt it to their requirements and connect it to the systems where their differentiated knowledge already lives.
Over the years, many talented people helped make OpenBB what it is today - employees, contributors, partners. Every one of them left a mark on the product.
But I want to recognize the people who carried OpenBB to the very end. Through the uncertainty and the final stretch, they kept building. They are engineers, product builders, designers and operators who have worked across financial data, AI, developer infrastructure and open source. In alphabetical order, they are:
- Andrew Kenreich, Head of Product Engineering - LinkedIn
- Darren Lee, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
- Ihsan Saracgil, CPO - LinkedIn
- José Donato, Software Engineer - LinkedIn, X, GitHub, Website
- Juan Alfonso, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
- Minh Hoang, Head of Product - LinkedIn, GitHub
- Ogonna Nnamani, DevOps - LinkedIn, Medium
- Rita Figueiredo, Head of Marketing - LinkedIn, Website
- Rita Soares, Head of Design - LinkedIn, Website
- Theodore Aptekarev, CTO - LinkedIn, GitHub
To our customers: thank you for trusting a small team with such an ambitious vision.
To our partners: thank you for building alongside us and helping create a more open financial data ecosystem. I hope the next chapter gives you even more freedom to serve your users.
To our investors: thank you for believing in us, including when OpenBB was little more than an idea being built from my living room in London. In particular, I want to thank OSS Capital and Joseph Jacks for supporting this decision and enabling the technology to live beyond the company. Two people I want to name separately: Justin Hoffman and Larry Augustin - working with both of you made me a better founder, but more importantly, a better person.
To every contributor who opened a pull request, reported a bug, wrote documentation, answered a question in Discord, built an integration or simply told someone else about OpenBB: thank you. OpenBB would not have been possible without you.
Finally, to every person who spent part of their career building OpenBB: thank you. We pushed the industry forward and proved that world-class financial infrastructure can be built in the open. The commercial outcome doesn't change the quality of the work.
OpenBB didn't become the company I imagined when I started this journey. But the mission was always larger than the company, and I still believe the ideas behind it are right.
If, ten years from now, firms around the world are using OpenBB as the foundation for software they truly own - connecting their own data, building their own workflows and deploying their own AI agents - then what we built will have achieved something that lasts far beyond us; which was my goal all along: have an impact.
Thank you for one hell of a ride.
