The LSE Directory / Data providers
IEX Cloud was a cloud-based financial data platform that delivered US equities, ETF, forex, crypto, options, fundamentals, corporate actions, economic and reference data through a single REST API with JSON responses, plus streaming access and a rules-based alerting engine. It was built and operated by IEX Group, the parent of the Investors Exchange (IEX), the stock exchange founded in 2012 by Brad Katsuyama and Ronan Ryan (the exchange at the center of Michael Lewis's book Flash Boys) that began trading on 25 October 2013. IEX Cloud launched publicly in May 2019 as a separate data business from the exchange itself. The platform's differentiator was accessibility: a single, standardized API surface with SDKs across eight major programming languages, a message and credit based freemium pricing model, and a sandbox testing environment, aimed at fintech developers, app builders and small firms who were priced out of traditional enterprise market data vendors like Bloomberg or Refinitiv. Beyond IEX's own exchange feed, it aggregated consolidated SIP data for full US market coverage and ran a "Premium Data" marketplace of third-party and alternative datasets from curated partners, letting customers license specialty content (ESG scores, stock-selection models, corporate-event data) alongside core prices through the same API and billing relationship rather than negotiating separately with each data owner. At scale, IEX Cloud reported processing over 2.5 billion API requests per day at an 8 millisecond average response time, serving roughly 150,000 registered users across 120 countries and, within its first two years, an estimated 20 million downstream end users, across more than 200 distinct datasets. On 31 May 2024, IEX Group announced it would retire all IEX Cloud products, and the service was fully shut down on 31 August 2024; the company cited that the business represented under 2 percent of IEX Group's revenue and had operated at a loss since inception. Two former IEX Cloud executives, head Tim Baker and head of product and technology Pedro Aguayo, together with a silent partner, acquired the platform's infrastructure, a copy of its codebase and its minimum content-provider agreements just before the shutdown deadline. The acquired assets were relaunched in September 2024 as a new, independently owned company originally registered under the temporary name BlueSkyAPI.com and now operating as Blue Sky Data, which set out to mirror the original IEX Cloud API so existing integrations could migrate with minimal code changes. IEX Cloud itself, as a product and legal entity, no longer exists; the iexcloud.io domain now serves only a retirement notice directing former users elsewhere.
