The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Fintel is a web-based financial research and data platform that tracks institutional fund ownership, insider transactions, short interest, and options flow across public companies, and turns those disclosures into screening and alerting tools. Its data is sourced from regulatory filings, chiefly SEC 13F, 13D/G, N-PORT, and Form 4 disclosures, alongside options market data, and covers more than 28,000 equities plus large catalogues of debt, mortgage-backed, and asset-backed securities. The company also operates a developer API (developers.fintel.io) that exposes the same filing search, ownership tracking, and sentiment data programmatically, positioned for use in research dashboards, compliance tooling, and algorithmic systems. Fintel's stated aim, in founder Wilton Risenhoover's own words, is to give "individual investors, traders, and small funds" an "institutional-quality data platform that is affordable and accessible," rather than data priced for large institutional desks. Its key technical differentiator is a proprietary Financial Query Language (FQL) that lets users build complex, multi-condition stock screens across ownership, insider, and options datasets, a capability the company markets as unavailable on comparable retail-facing sites. The product spans the investment lifecycle from idea screening through portfolio monitoring, and access is tiered: a free plan alongside paid Bronze, Silver, and Gold subscriptions that add features such as real-time alerts, custom dashboards, unusual options activity data, and Excel export. Fintel was founded in 2015 by Wilton Risenhoover, a software engineer with a computer science degree from the University of Kansas and an MBA from UCLA Anderson, who had previously worked as CTO at venture-backed startups including Tuition.io. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles. It describes tracking filings from more than 9,500 funds against over 63,000 securities traded worldwide, with data drawn from the SEC as well as international filing regimes including the LSE, ASX, and SGX. As of mid-2026, third-party company-data trackers list Fintel as a small team of around a dozen employees operating as a bootstrapped or lightly funded business rather than a venture-scaled one. By 2022, Fintel had expanded beyond its core screening and ownership tools with brokerage account integration and Finpedia, a collaborative wiki for shared investment research, broadening the platform from a pure data terminal toward a community research layer built on top of the same filings data.
