Hey there— I'm Satya, one of the founders of Dendrite. I've been working at the intersection of statistics, computing, and finance for close to 20 years now.
People have asked why we built Dendrite. Dendrite was born out of necessity. While working on my Ph.D., I realized how expensive, feature-limiting, and difficult accessing any tool or product I needed for my research was. I had taken these tools for granted, as they came easily when big institutions employed me as they had enterprise licenses. Also, once I left my job, I needed to set up my home lab(a cluster) and then weave some open-source tools that didn't work well together to do research. I looked around and experimented with a few products, but the popular tools I tried didn't cut it for many reasons. Some of these tools forced me to pay exorbitant prices for on-cloud resources or restricted how many predictions I could run, how many cores I could use, or how many MB of data I could upload. These and a plethora of restrictions made iterating in my research excruciatingly slow and not to mention expensive.
I urgently needed a good enterprise research platform to do iterative research not only for my Ph.D. but also for modeling for the fintech startup I was eager to start. This product has to be priced in a way that doesn't eat my runway. I was embarrassing myself without a proper business intelligence and machine learning platform. I was getting disorganized while doing research, writing research papers, and dropping balls, and my work was slipping.
So, we had to build our drawing on open-source and custom-built tools that work harmoniously as an end-to-end business intelligence and statistical learning platform. I focused on building a simple, straightforward collection of tools that would allow researchers with varied skills to do end-to-end statistical learning, from raw data to visualization to predictive models to state-of-the-art papers. The work put in for this led to the birth of Dendrite!
Dendrite, as it stands, is an end-to-end statistical learning platform that has three products - Visualistic(BI), Statlab(ML), and Newster(News).
There are several problems and challenges that we would like to tackle head-on. These I have faced personally and heard through my conversations with banking and investment banking colleagues. We aim to make Dendrite a full-fledged research terminal that enables retail and institutional data wranglers.
Thanks for reading and for giving Dendrite a try.
Contact me directly if you have any questions or feedback at sbs@dendrite.ai. I look forward to hearing from you.
