AlphaSense announced Thursday it closed on a $180 million Series C round co-led by Goldman Sachs and Viking Global, a $25 billion hedge fund headed by billionaire Andreas Halvorsen. The market intelligence startup has also gotten a vote of confidence from several other prominent players in the financial sector, including Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America and Barclays.
Over the last decade, AlphaSense has become a go-to resource for thousands of companies and financial institutions, providing access to Wall Street equity research, trade journals, conference call transcripts and various other pieces of private and public information so they can better make business decisions. Plus, with the help of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the platform can get its customers the information they need fast, which is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
“If you’re entire job is based on making sure you have all the information you need to make a decision — and these are million, billion-dollar decisions — you have to mitigate the risks of missing something,” Kiva Kolstein, the company’s president and chief revenue officer, told Built In when the company raised its Series B in 2019. “Whatever you’re looking for, AlphaSense will find it and send you where it exists.”
Of course, this has become even more important over the last year, when the corporate market has been especially tumultuous. As a result, AlphaSense says its user adoption per customer has increased by nearly 20x recently. Its platform is now used by the majority of S&P 100 companies, most of the top asset management firms, and all of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies.
Today, many of AlphaSense’s investors, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, are also users. Citi is a customer, too, but provides unique content to the platform as part of an exclusive partnership as well, offering unique data that helps AlphaSense stand out from the rest of the market intelligence tools out there.
“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,” Holger Staude, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, said in a statement.
To keep up the momentum, AlphaSense says it will use this fresh funding to improve its platform and broaden its product offerings. The company is also planning to expand internationally, which means it will continue investing in global and foreign language content. This also means it will be growing its customer service teams in North America and Europe, as well as its engineering teams at its NYC headquarters and offices in Finland and India.
