AlphaSense Raises $180 Million Series C Led by Viking Global and Goldman Sachs, Joined by Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Cowen, AllianceBernstein
- Co-founded by India-born Raj Neervannan
- Infusion of funds signals expansion of business in India
- Innovation hubs in Pune and Mumbai seeking to hire local talent and double the strong cohort of developers
MUMBAI and PUNE, India, Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — New York-based AlphaSense, the leading market intelligence and search platform, today 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.
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 and Tribeca Venture Partners.
Raj Neervannan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of AlphaSense, commented on the occasion, “AlphaSense has emerged as the market intelligence platform and business search engine of choice for global brands such as 3M, SAP, and Siemens. With investment from the world’s leading financial institutions, we are aggressively working towards expanding our India operations. In the next two years, we intend to scale the research and development of our platform, and a huge contributor to this will be the doubling of our innovation hub in Pune and Mumbai.”
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 their 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.
AlphaSense culture video link: AlphaSense at Work
Product video link: AlphaSense: For Decisions That Matter
About AlphaSense
AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, our AI-based technology has helped professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights from an extensive universe of public and private content-including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. Our platform is trusted by over 1,800 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 450 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and India. For more information, please visit www.alpha-sense.com.
About Viking Global Investors
Founded in 1999, Viking is a global investment management firm that manages approximately $48 billion of capital for its investors. It has offices in Greenwich, New York, Hong Kong, London, and San Francisco and is registered as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For more information, please visit www.vikingglobal.com.
About Goldman Sachs Asset Management Growth Equity
Bringing together traditional and alternative investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management provides clients around the world with a dedicated partnership and focus on long-term performance. Since 2003 the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management has invested over $13 billion in companies led by visionary founders and CEOs. The team focuses exclusively on investments in growth stage and technology-driven companies spanning multiple industries, including enterprise technology, financial technology, consumer and healthcare. For more information, please visit www.growth.gs.com.
