Why We Merged with Vema Data
August 19, 2025 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO, Sidelight
Today marks a transformative moment for our company—and for the future of data and application management in financial services.
I’m proud to announce that Sidelight has officially merged with Vema Data. Together, we’re building something that hasn’t existed before: an intelligent, unified platform purpose-built to drive actionable intelligence. Helping asset managers and Financial Institutions to drive strategic control of their third-party data and application use and spend. Read the full press release.
This isn’t just a merger. It’s a launchpad.
Why We Merged
When we founded Sidelight, our goal was simple but ambitious: bring transparency to an opaque ecosystem shrouded in complexity and optimize outcomes for both vendors and users.
Globally $42Bn is spent by financial firms on data and applications, yet there are no standardized checks and balances as to what services drive value.
Firms spend millions—sometimes hundreds of millions—on data, applications, and tools. Yet many still rely on disconnected spreadsheets, legacy ‘old-school’ systems, or scattered processes to track how that money is being spent and how much alpha it is bringing. For an industry that relies intrinsically on data to make investment decisions, it is always surprising that firms tend to take a less structured approach to measure the value of the services that they are buying.
Taurance Robnet and the Vema Data team shared a similar vision. They brought the technology, and a reputation for helping Buy-side and Commodities firms untangle vendor complexity. Sidelight brought deep Asset Management and Financial data expertise, trusted relationships, and AI innovation to turn that vision into reality.
Together, we’ve created something new—a straightforward platform that unifies spend, usage, contracts, and value into one powerful system of intelligence. This is the future of vendor management.
What This Means for the Industry
The financial services industry is at an inflection point. With rising costs and regulatory pressures, constantly expanding data needs, fees shrinking, and operational expectations increasing, institutions can no longer afford to push vendor management down the operational priority list.
Many legacy mechanisms for Vendor management are costly, antiquated and lack the ability to move fast to rapidly turn vendor usage and licensing into valuable intelligence. Creating a series of AI driven modular tools with common interfaces and API’s allow firms to take a more selective approach that leads directly to faster implementations and measurable returns.
Increasingly firms are demanding:
- Real-time visibility into spend, usage, and licensing terms
- Automated intelligence to surface waste, overlap, and risk
- Data-backed insights to guide renewals, negotiations, and stack optimization
That’s exactly what Sidelight now delivers.
We’re launching with three core product modules that solve some of the most urgent challenges our clients face:
- Cost & Subscription Module - A centralized, live dashboard to track every vendor, license, user, and renewal—replacing spreadsheets with clarity.
- Contracts AI Module - A breakthrough assistant that answers plain-English questions about any contract, flags risks, and ties terms directly to access and usage.
- Value Module - The missing piece—showing how tools are actually used, what your teams think of them, and whether they’re worth the cost.
Together, these modules form an end-to-end system for smarter vendor governance—and they’re already driving measurable ROI for our clients.
Built by Industry Experts. Driven by Results.
Our team is made up of veterans from eVestment (Nasdaq), Investment Metrics, Vanguard, and PwC—people who have lived the complexity of managing large-scale data stacks and vendor portfolios. We know the pain points because we’ve been on the other side of the table. That’s why we built Sidelight the way we did: not as another vendor dashboard, but as a decision-making engine.
We’re not just solving for visibility. We’re solving for impact.
What’s Next
This is just the beginning. Sidelight is now live and available to firms across the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and Asia-Pacific. We’re offering free trials of our Cost & Subscription Module and Contracts AI Module, and we’re actively onboarding firms looking to bring intelligence and automation into their vendor strategy.
If you’re ready to take control of your data and application spend—if you’re tired of the guesswork, inefficiencies, and wasted budget—I’d love for you to experience what we’ve built. Learn more or request a free trial.
Thank you to everyone who’s believed in this vision. The future of data intelligence in financial services is here. And we’re just getting started.
We're not just solving for visibility. We're solving for impact.
Charles Ashwanden, CEO and Co-Founder of Sidelight.