Volaren
Our story
The tools that value a company were never built for the person who owns it.
Where it came from
The Volaren cofounders met at the University of Chicago and went to work on Wall Street. We spent our days inside software almost nobody outside the industry has ever seen: a terminal licence, a data subscription, a modelling stack. Tens of thousands a year, and all of it built on the assumption that a trained analyst sits on the other side.
Everyone else gets the two ends of the barbell. Raw data, with no view of what it means. Or opinions, with no way to check them.
What struck us was not the price. It was that the work is repeatable. Pull the filings, normalise the statements, build the model, find the comparables, stress it until something breaks. Days of assembly, and then one hour of judgment. The judgment was the only part worth paying for.
That is a machine's work, right up until the moment it is not.
The rule we started with
The machine does the assembly, and it never does the thinking it cannot show you.
No number here is written by a language model. Numbers come from code, from filings and market data; the model writes the prose around them. Follow any figure back and you land on its source.
When something does not exist, we show nothing rather than a zero. A backtest tells you it flatters itself, because the companies that failed are not in the universe you can see today. That warning is stamped on every result we produce, and we would rather lose the sale than take it out.
Those rules cost us features. They are the reason to trust anything else on the screen.
What we are trying to do
Not to give anyone a hot tip. There is plenty of that already and it has made very few people rich.
We want an individual to have the same process a professional has. The same discipline about where a number came from. The same habit of asking what would have to be true. The same honesty about what the evidence does not support.
Good investing was never a secret. It was a set of tools, kept behind a price that had nothing to do with what they cost to build.
We are opening it up.