AlphaSense, the New York-based leading market intelligence and search platform has just recently closed its $225M Series D funding round. The Growth Equity arm within Goldman Sachs led this round alongside Viking Global Investors and now ranks the company as a unicorn at a $1.7B valuation. The amount also includes a substantial debt investment earlier this year from funds and/or accounts managed by BlackRock.
This valuation is nearly double its previous private equity valuation as it raised $180M in its Series C in September 2021. Goldman Sachs and Viking Global teamed up to lead this previous round which also saw banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Barclays & Wells Fargo, among others rushing for a slice of the pie.
Achieving key milestones
The valuation increase is the result of AlphaSense’s rapid and sustained growth, enforced by the achievement of key revenue and product milestones. The data tech unicorn now boasts annual recurring revenue (ARR) which exceeds $100M. Other key metrics of AlphaSense’s business have experienced significant gains including user and customer base, which both grew by well over 100% in the past year. Its customer base comprising of 3,500 customers now includes over 78% of the S&P 100, 97% of the Dow 50 and 70% of the top asset management firms as well as banks.
AlphaSense is also assisting leading companies in a wide variety of industries ranging from energy, industrials, consumer goods and technology. Its platform exhibits a great appeal to knowledgeable workers across a wide range of roles including strategy, competitive intelligence, corporate development, investor relations and financial analysis.
What is AlphaSense?
The data tech was founded by Jack Kokko & Raj Neervannan in 2011. AlphaSense’s CEO Jack Kokko while working as an analyst at Morgan Stanley noted that the process of uncovering key data and trends was incredibly time-consuming as it was manual and far too often made the process unreliable. AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform leveraging proprietary search technology powered by AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to help professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights drawn from an extensive universe of public and private content including news, event transcripts, company filings, expert call transcripts, trade journals, and equity research.
By having on-demand access to key data points and insights, professionals can better make critical decisions with confidence and speed. This in turn improves business performance and outcomes. AlphaSense currently employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., the U.K., Finland, Germany, and India.
The data tech provides Wall Street Insights (WSI), which is a content provider to the world’s top analyst teams and brings together an exclusive collection of research and proprietary tech under a single platform. AlphaSense also has a formal partnership with Citi which makes it the only provider of aftermarket research to the corporate market.
The newly acquired capital will help further aid investments in product development, content expansion and customer support as well as driving organic growth and strategic transactions. AlphaSense recently acquired Stream by Mosaic; a provider of a leading library of expert interview transcripts in October 2021. Last month, it also purchased Sentieo, a financial intelligence platform designed for investors.
“We are thrilled by the continued support of preeminent investors like Goldman Sachs and Viking and the addition of BlackRock as we embark on the next chapter of our growth,” exclaimed Jack Kokko, the CEO of AlphaSense. “This round of funding will allow AlphaSense to invest in our growth and capitalize on opportunities to expand our content sets and improve our value offering, furthering our mission to help companies across all industries make better decisions with greater confidence and speed.”
“We are excited to upsize our investment in AlphaSense,” explained Holger Staude, an MD within the Growth Equity business at Goldman Sachs. “Achieving high organic growth and strong business fundamentals while exceeding $100M in ARR is a substantial accomplishment and demonstrates the team’s focus on building an enduring business in a large market.”
