Kultura Capital: Building a Data-First Investment Platform with MotherDuck and Omni
Product velocity is a hallmark of any hypercompetitor. MotherDuck & Omni ship product with incredible speed, and that’s why we trust them to move with us.
Kristov Paulus
Founder, Chief Investment Officer
Kultura invests in public and private category-defining cultural leaders across the technology sector.
Overview
Kultura Capital is a fundamental investment firm that identifies and invests in hypercompetitors — exceptional tech companies that create and disrupt markets. Founded by Chief Investment Officer Kristov Paulus, the firm integrates deep fundamental research with modern data infrastructure to analyze companies across differing subsectors to generate clean, comparable insights.
"Our platform isn't about dashboards — it's about how quickly we can understand investment opportunities, manage risk, and anticipate market shifts," says Kristov. "AI and modern infrastructure let us stretch our research further without adding headcount.”
The Challenge
Kultura was built from day one to bring the best of traditional human-based investing with quantitative insights from AI and the never-ending firehose of financial data. As they selected potential offerings, Kultura needed a solution that was powerful and usable for both technical and non-technical users. From the start, the team treated these challenges as first-order design constraints, having seen firsthand how investment firms "invest in tech" but struggle to generate business outcomes:
- Standardizing the Incomparable: Every potential investment is different. Without enforced consistency in format, taxonomy, and assumptions, cross-company analysis quickly breaks down, making meaningful comparisons nearly impossible.
- Integrating External Data: External data brings its own assumptions and formats, and without the right infrastructure, trying to align data from internal and external sources creates friction rather than leverage.
- Breaking the BI Bottleneck: "We need tools that can adapt as fast as our thinking," says Charles Trausch, CTO of Kultura. "Without that, every new question becomes a bottleneck." Most BI tools force engineers into dashboard support roles while leaving business users dependent on IT for new analyses.
- Usable by Technical and Non-technical Users: Kultura requires a solution that can be utilized across functions by investors, business development, finance, and other parts of the organization.
The Evaluation
With those constraints in mind, Kultura focused on tools — and partners — that share their pace, design, and ambition.
| Criteria 📋 | Findings with MotherDuck + Omni ✅ |
|---|---|
| Rapid Development | “MotherDuck is insanely performant, and there’s no infrastructure to manage,” says Charles. “The cost of experimentation is incredibly low — which means we can afford to ask more questions and build more features, faster.” |
| Analysis without Friction | “Omni gave analysts a way to explore the system holistically — linking live models, market context, and internal signals without code, training, or handoffs,” explains Charles. “It didn’t ask us to reshape our thinking to fit the tool — it fit the way we already think.” |
| Speed of Innovation | "Product velocity is a hallmark of any hypercompetitor,” Kristov says. “MotherDuck & Omni ship product with incredible speed, and that’s why we trust them to move with us.” |
The Solution: MotherDuck + Omni
Founded in DuckDB
Kultura built its research platform on DuckDB — drawn in by its speed, simplicity, and developer-friendly design. Just prior to launch, Kristov had noticed a pattern: engineers responsible for massive enterprise systems privately turned to DuckDB when they needed to move fast and avoid overhead.
"We were running serious AI models on laptops with no setup, configuration, or infrastructure," Charles remembers. "It felt like cheating. I remember thinking, 'I must be missing something.' But it just... works — and fast."
They passed around .db files and ran analyses locally, focusing on innovation, not infrastructure. But as they grew, those models still lived in local files that only the technology team could access. Making the system usable across the firm meant exposing it without breaking it.
Seamless Transition to MotherDuck
While exploring ways to integrate DuckDB into legacy BI tooling, Charles came across MotherDuck: a cloud backend built for this exact use case. "We went from local to cloud infrastructure by changing two characters," says Charles. "I swapped in ‘md:’ and it just worked."
MotherDuck gave Kultura shared access without sacrificing structure — no config, no rewrites, no tradeoffs.
Integrated Analytics with Omni
Moving to the cloud solved infrastructure challenges, but the interface problem remained. Most BI tools introduced friction through rigid schemas and workflows that flattened the system's design.
"At first, we planned to limit data access — a ‘walled garden’ with just a few curated metrics," says Charles. "But the opposite happened: our investment analysts — highly technical, but not data engineers — were the ones pushing to access more and more of our data. With most tools, that level of access would be risky. But with MotherDuck and Omni, it was frictionless. They didn't get lost. They got curious."
Omni stood out as the first tool to natively integrate with MotherDuck — no extra connectors, no remapping. And Kultura became the first firm to run production BI on the MotherDuck/Omni backend. Analysts could explore live data directly, without losing structure or context. Omni didn’t just expose Kultura’s data ecosystem — it visualized the firm’s logic in real time.
The Impact
This is Kultura's system of record — the foundation for how their fundamental investment process works.
- Structure that compounds
From the beginning, every model and internal artifact was designed to be machine-readable, comparable, and extensible. Built in MotherDuck and explored through Omni, that structure compounds: assumptions align, outputs connect, and insights carry across names without additional work. - Decision-making, embedded
Omni is open in every investment team meeting — not as a dashboard, but as a lens into live assumptions, metrics, and logic. When the team evaluates an investment opportunity, they're already in the model — filtering by tags in MotherDuck, reviewing live metrics in Omni, and tracing assumptions back to their sources in the code. No handoffs. No exports. Just shared access to the system that underpins their thinking. - Shared truth, faster conviction
Everyone sees the same structure. Everyone can build on it. That means better questions, faster iteration, and tighter conviction. "You don't need to be a data engineer to explore ideas," says Charles. "And when you do, you're working from the same logic, the same facts, the same raw source — not someone's interpretation of it."
While some of the performance metrics are proprietary, the outcomes are clear internally: faster iteration, tighter team alignment, and conviction built on shared, live data rather than static exports.
Future Vision
Kultura's infrastructure will continue to evolve, but the principles remain fixed: fast feedback loops and tools that align with how the firm thinks.
As scale accelerates, MotherDuck's development of multi-node writes, user-level compute, and native Hive-style S3 partitioning makes it even more suited to Kultura's structured, data-first architecture. These capabilities enable Kultura to scale to larger datasets without sacrificing speed and flexibility.
Meanwhile, Omni's horizontally-scaling architecture ensures that as Kultura brings more of its internal ML outputs into the system, the interface will remain responsive for the entire team, regardless of concurrent users. With Omni, Kultura is able to integrate quantitative signals without creating friction for analysts.
"This isn't about building for complexity," Kristov notes. "It's about lowering the cost of iteration. When analysts and engineers can work from the same structure — and test ideas just as easily — that's where the edge compounds."
