Movers & Shakers: Yoshi Yokokawa talks Alpaca and funky looking espresso machines… Oh and A.I. trading tech.

We are all setup and ready to film at the recent Fintech Exchange event in Chicago. One of the Barchart team members assigned to keep the filming on schedule and those on the list coming on time introduced me to a very hip Yoshi Yokokawa from Alpaca.ai.

Wearing your typical tech startup gear of t-shirt (with their logo obviously), jeans, sneakers and a smile from ear to ear; I hear “Oh, and BTW these guys are in the AI scene…” as Yoshi and I shake hands.

Having spent the previous day researching and preparing for interviews, I knew who Yoshi was and what his recent startup Alpaca.ai were up to.

One may expect to see the Japanese involved in AI, as one of the world leaders in Robotics; in lab clothing working for billion dollar companies with facilities rivalling that of Google.

However, jeans and t-shirt wearing, young, all decked out with your typical Silicon Valley swag after a healthy round of funding; Yoshi is the future of AI and guess what? He is into trading… Big time.

With a young tech focused talent pool based out of Kobe, Japan and Silicon Valley, they are “democratising AI technology” or as we prefer: blending the world of AI and trading like vodka and orange.

What’s new?

We launched US Stock real time market scan based on specific candlestick pattern at apscan.capitalico.com! We also developed real fast database dedicated for capital markets time-series data, so now we are ready to deal with many kinds of complex queries real time!

What is the biggest thing you can improve on from last year?

Last year, we didn’t have a product yet… but now we are out with Capitalico available to everyone on their web-browser.

Funniest thing, incident that happened in the office this year?

Our technical advisor Luke brought this portable hand-press espresso machine, which really looked like something else…

If we were sitting here in one year from now having this conversation, what is the biggest thing you would hope to have achieved?

We have growing user based across the asset-classes of US stocks, Japanese stocks, FX, and futures!