Frequently Asked Questions

Vedex is a B2B vendor intelligence platform purpose-built for alternative data procurement. It serves hedge funds, quantitative trading firms, asset managers, private equity firms, and enterprise data teams who need to evaluate, compare, and procure alternative data products. Vedex tracks over 5,200 vendors and 3,500 data products with pricing benchmarks, compliance audits, AI readiness scores, and competitive landscape analysis.

Alternative data refers to non-traditional datasets used by institutional investors and enterprises for decision-making. Examples include satellite imagery, web scraping data, credit card transaction data, social media sentiment, geolocation data, supply chain data, ESG metrics, patent filings, and job posting analytics. The alternative data market is estimated at $7–10 billion annually and growing 20–30% per year.

Vedex is an open intelligence platform focused on transparency and machine-readability. Unlike traditional marketplaces or closed directories, Vedex provides publicly accessible vendor profiles, composite scoring (Trust Score, AI Readiness Score), annualized pricing benchmarks with confidence indicators, and machine-readable endpoints (llms.txt, MCP server, JSON API) designed for both human analysts and AI research agents. Vedex does not broker data transactions — it provides the intelligence layer for procurement decisions.

Vedex covers all major alternative data categories including financial data, ESG, satellite imagery, social media, web scraping, geolocation, credit card transactions, supply chain, patent filings, job postings, real estate, weather, and more. The platform maps vendor coverage across global markets including the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Asia, and emerging markets via an interactive sector-by-geography coverage matrix.

The Trust Score (0-100) sums points for affirmative, vendor-reported security and compliance attestations: SOC 2 Type II (30 points), ISO 27001 (25 points), GDPR compliance (15 points), stated encryption standards (10 points), stated penetration / third-party security testing (10 points), stated data residency options (5 points), stated written compliance policies (5 points). Audits reported as in progress, partial GDPR compliance, and security testing other than penetration or third-party testing earn partial credit (SOC 2 12, ISO 27001 10, GDPR 6, testing 5). Missing or undisclosed information earns nothing, and breach history is not scored because the absence of a reported incident cannot be verified. These are the vendors' attestations as collected from public sources, not Vedex's; Vedex has not audited them. Verify directly with the vendor before relying on them.

The AI Readiness Score measures how well a vendor’s data products integrate with modern AI/ML pipelines. It is scored from 0 to 100 across five dimensions: LLM-friendly output formats such as structured JSON and JSONL (30 points), Model Context Protocol (MCP) support (25 points), embedding and vector database readiness (25 points), API availability and type (10 points), and rich machine-readable data formats like Parquet and Arrow (10 points).

Vedex normalizes all pricing to annualized figures for apples-to-apples comparison across different billing frequencies (monthly, quarterly, annual, enterprise contracts). Each price point carries a confidence indicator — verified marketplace prices score 0.85–0.95, while AI-estimated prices score around 0.4. Pricing competitiveness compares a vendor’s annualized price against category peers to determine relative value.

Vedex aggregates data from multiple sources: public marketplace listings (such as Datarade, Snowflake Marketplace, AWS Data Exchange), vendor websites, regulatory filings, and proprietary research. Data provenance is tracked per field, and the Data Quality page shows field completeness rates across the entire database.

Vedex currently tracks over 5,200 alternative data vendors and more than 3,500 data products with pricing intelligence. This includes vendors listed on major marketplaces as well as independent data providers.

Vedex continuously aggregates and refreshes vendor and product data from marketplace listings and vendor websites. Pricing data, compliance certifications, and vendor profiles are updated as new information becomes available. Each data point includes freshness indicators so users can assess recency.

Data is aggregated from multiple marketplace platforms (e.g., Datarade, Snowflake Marketplace, AWS Data Exchange, Bloomberg Enterprise), vendor websites, public filings, and proprietary research. The platform tracks data provenance by source and provides transparency on estimation confidence for each field.

Yes. The Data Quality page (/quality) shows field completeness rates across the entire vendor database — for example, what percentage of vendors have pricing data, compliance certifications, or AI readiness assessments. Individual vendor profiles also indicate which fields are verified versus estimated.

Yes. Vedex provides a JSON REST API for programmatic access. Endpoints include: /api/data?type=vendors for vendor data, /api/data?type=products for product data, with support for filtering, field selection, pagination, and individual entity lookup by ID. Every vendor and product also has a machine-readable markdown profile at /vendor/{slug}/llms.txt and /products/{slug}/llms.txt.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is Anthropic’s open protocol that enables AI models to securely access external data sources and tools. Vedex provides an MCP server that exposes vendor search, product comparison, compliance lookup, and pricing intelligence as MCP tools. This allows AI assistants like Claude to query Vedex data directly during conversations. Connect via: npx -y @anthropic-ai/claude-code --mcp-config with the Vedex MCP endpoint.

Add the Vedex MCP server to your Claude Code or Claude Desktop configuration. The server exposes tools for searching vendors, comparing products, looking up compliance data, and querying pricing intelligence. You can also access bulk data exports at /export/vendors.md and /export/products.md with pagination support. See the Developer Hub at /api-docs for full integration instructions.

Yes. Vedex provides paginated bulk exports in markdown format: /export/vendors.md?page=1&per_page=500 for vendors and /export/products.md?page=1&per_page=500 for products. Response headers include X-Total-Count for pagination. A sitemap at /sitemap.xml and full reference document at /llms-full.txt are also available for discovery.

Yes. The Vedex intelligence dashboard is free to use. You can browse all vendor profiles, product listings, compliance scores, AI readiness rankings, pricing benchmarks, and geographic coverage data without a paid subscription.

The free tier includes full access to the Vendor Explorer, Product Explorer with hybrid search, Compliance Matrix, AI Readiness Leaderboard, Pricing Intelligence, Geographic Coverage, Market & Competition analysis, Data Quality metrics, and the Data Room procurement workspace. API access and MCP server tools are also available.

No account is required to browse vendor profiles, product listings, scores, and analytics. Creating a free account unlocks additional features such as the Data Room for shortlisting and comparing products, vendor claiming for data providers who want to manage their profiles, and saved preferences.