Yes, this is true, they often do invest internally to create their own tools.

We believe however that we offer better tools at a cheaper price and can get it into their hands now!

for what i have seen in the demo it looks very very good. And I agree with a teak here and there this sw can be adopted by a range of trading houses of any kind of commodity, including the big ones with refineries. The difficulty in building systems like these, even if AI driven, is the myriad of business rules and the different specifics of each commodity trading.

I really doubt that, trade capital and relationships are what define those houses, not their tech stack. Some of them are already pretty advanced from an in-house development perspective and could compete with the best of commercial-ready in the market trading platforms and data sources.