Steve Cohen firm invests in Bloomberg Terminal rival

The ubiquitous and breathtakingly expensive Bloomberg Terminal could be shoved off its pedestal, if billionaire hedge fund king Steve Cohen has his way.

The venture capital division of his family business Point72 Asset Management had invested into Toronto-based startup Street Contxt, it announced this week.

It was the latest in a string of investors to put a total of $15m into the startup.

The firm says it was building a platform to allow managers, banks and firms to disseminate research, commentary and news to their clients.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound very revolutionary, but the unique selling point was that it would use carefully-built code to deliver only the information clients wanted to read - solving the problem of catch-all subscriptions and mountains of unread emails.

Street Contxt was also hoping to allow research analysts to better focus on their niches while controlling costs, by allowing them to hone in on the topics their readers and potential clients were most interested in.

It was also suggested that the company could charge on a per-piece basis, rather than using the traditional subscription model, making it “the natural evolution of the Bloomberg Terminal,” CEO Blair Livingston told Fortune.

Cost indeed did appear to be a major factor in the success of Street Contxt so far - with average charges of between $1,000 and $5,000, it already had more than 180,000 users.

That compared well to the Bloomberg Terminal, which costs around $22,000 per year and had just under 325,000 daily users in 2016.

But Street Contxt is entering a crowded market, with a number of startups in recent years trying to rival - but not quite match - the capability of the terminal with the coloured keyboard.

Whether the Canadians can rival the big boys from New York - as Cohen’s firm seems to think - remained to be seen.