New York-based AlphaSense, the leading market intelligence and search platform, announced its $180 million Series C financing round led by Viking Global Investors and the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs), joined by Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Barclays, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Cowen Inc., and AllianceBernstein, as well as existing investors.
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The capital infusion will be used to further invest in product development, content expansion and customer support, and to drive organic growth as well as acquisitions. The company previously closed a $50 million Series B in July 2019, which included prominent investors such as Innovation Endeavors, Jim Simons’ Euclidean Capital, Soros Fund Management LLC, and Tribeca Venture Partners.
AlphaSense’s technology leverages AI and NLP to extract relevant insights from an extensive universe of public and private content, including over 10,000 premium business sources. This enables professionals to make critical decisions with confidence and speed, thus improving business performance and outcomes.
The Series C funding announcement closely follows AlphaSense’s recent expansion of Wall Street Insights® (WSI), which provides content from the world’s top analyst teams and brings together an exclusive collection of research and proprietary technology under one platform. As the most recent addition, earlier this year AlphaSense formalized a partnership with Citi, becoming its only provider of aftermarket research to the corporate market. Notably, many of WSI’s content providers are participating as strategic investors in this financing round.
AlphaSense’s recent growth has been driven by strong adoption in the corporate market, alongside continued penetration across financial services. The company’s customer base now includes the majority of S&P 500 companies, over 75% of the S&P 100, 70% of the top asset management firms, 76% of the top consultancies, all of the largest 20 pharmaceutical companies, and leading companies in wide-ranging industries such as energy, industrials, consumer goods, and technology. In addition to growth across industries, user adoption per customer has increased nearly 20x, with the platform appealing to knowledge workers across a wide range of roles including strategy, competitive intelligence, investor relations, corporate development, and financial analysis, in addition to investment analysts and portfolio managers.
“AlphaSense provides relevant market intelligence to many of the world’s leading companies, helping them to make impactful decisions more effectively,” said Holger Staude, a Managing Director within the Growth Equity business at Goldman Sachs. “Just like search engines have become large businesses on the consumer side, we believe AlphaSense has an opportunity to help the business world extract key insights from the vast volumes of unstructured business information.”
This funding round will be used to invest in product development, and expand content offerings—today covering both public and private companies and including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, regulatory content, equity research, and more—to deliver ever more relevant and accurate search results for users around the world. As it expands internationally, AlphaSense will continue investing in global and foreign-language content, as well as grow its customer service teams in North America and Europe, and its engineering teams in Finland, India, and New York.
“Every company’s destiny is the cumulative sum of the decisions it makes,” said Jack Kokko, CEO of AlphaSense. “Our platform, with search technology combined with exclusive content, helps companies across all industries make better decisions more confidently and quickly. We are excited that the world’s top investment banks are joining this round along with preeminent pre-IPO growth investors like Viking Global and GS Growth. This kind of strategic investment is unique and further validates our mission.”
Source: AlphaSense