For Yaela Shamberg, mergers and acquisitions are like bringing the band back together.
At present, she is chief product officer and co-founder of Communify, a financial services tech firm in Santa Monica that emerged from stealth in 2024. Bolstering its data processing and management chops, the company in October acquired Empaxis Data Management in El Segundo – a move that reunites Shamberg and Community Chief Executive John Wise with former colleagues at InvestCloud Inc.
It was a combination that added synergy not only through their integrated products, but also through the tried-and-true collaborative nature of the people involved.
“I think it is a really good environment,” Shamberg said, speaking about general M&A activity. “I think a lot of people are looking for ways that they can continue to grow, not just organically, but also through partnership and strategic opportunities. Emphaxis, that was fairly easy. We had worked with them in our previous firm.”
Shamberg described Communify as exactly what the name amalgamates – unifying the communication of financial market data. Its software tools connect to and process troves of financial information and insight from data sources, aggregators and news media; and those tools allow clients to customize their own presentations of this data to their own clients.
Communify’s customer base boils down to four industries: asset managers, wealth managers, online brokerages and news media. One obvious deployment of a Communify-powered product is the Markets Data tool on the Financial Times website. It also powers a mobile app for financial news and research firm Finextra – deciphering “noise from signals into insights,” Shamberg explained.
Though Communify’s reach continues to grow globally, North America remains its bread and butter. It counts 85% of the online brokerage business on the continent among its clientele. The company is growing “at pace” in Australia and has made significant inroads into the London and Japanese markets.
Powering this success is the company’s Market Intelligent News Discovery artificial intelligence model. It’s not the generative engine you likely associate with ChatGPT, but rather a deterministic model that compiles and presents hard data points and information reliably.
“When we thought about Communify and why we wanted to start Communify, we really wanted to tell stories, and in order to do that, you need a lot of data, right?” Shamberg explained. “Great design requires great data. You want to give AI insights, AI alerts and AI stories, and that all requires the thoughtfulness of knowing the industry, but then also the data.”
Enter Empaxis, which comes with the tools necessary for overcoming barriers created by fragmented internal data systems, and already worked with a cross section of Communify’s clientele on the data management side.
“They’re experts in helping integrate data from all these disparate systems,” Shamberg said. “What Empaxis does is it really helps bring those data all together and normalize that data and serve that up. Then that can come directly into our ecosystem and unlock the power of what you can do with it.
“We acquired it because,” she added, “their leaders are really solving this data problem and this data extraction issue.”
It’s not the first acquisition in Communify’s journey since emerging as a product of design and build firm Just Build It, where Shamberg is also a partner. After developing as a client-data platform, it acquired Fincentric in August 2024 to pave way for combining that information with broader market data. The transaction for Fincentric, which formerly did business as Markit On Demand, was completed in partnership with private equity firm Stellex Capital Management.
Shamberg has been on the opposite side of this table before. As one of the founding members of West Hollywood-based InvestCloud, she helped guide it to a $1 billion sale to Santa Monica-based Clearlake Capital Group and New York-based Motive Partners.
Moving forward, the Empaxis deal will likely illustrate how Communify continues to grow, Shamberg said.
The prior relationships, business synergies and trustworthiness made the company “an obvious choice.” And it helped that they were already familiar with each other as mutual partners with clients.
“It was much more like a collaborative partnership of what the future looked like together, rather than scooping something up,” Shamberg continued. “I think they really know us, and they really shared in that vision of where we want Communify to go and where we’re taking it. They wanted to be a part of it, so I thought it was pretty straightforward.”
The setting makes a difference as well. Having grown up in Alaska, Shamberg decamped to both marquee financial centers New York and London in earlier stages of her career. Eventually finding her way to Los Angeles, she said, introduced her to a different sort of entrepreneur – one in search of creative solutions, pliant enough to dive into the evolving world of technology.
“I think L.A. is a good place for innovation. I think people aren’t necessarily stuck in the ways of Wall Street,” Shamberg said. “New York’s a wonderful place; I think here we’re a little bit still more of the ‘Wild West,’ which I really appreciate about it. There’s more innovation. There’s more outside thinking. There are people that are kind of in the industry, but maybe in a different industry. They didn’t go into the analyst program at an investment bank and that’s the only thing they’ve ever done.”
Zane Hill
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