Alternative Data News and Insight

In this intelligence piece, we assess data-driven deal sourcing in private markets relevant to private equity and venture capital use cases.

We introduce private equity investors to the conventional and alternative datasets available for use, such as consumer transactions, sentiment, geolocation, financial, and employment data.

While hedge funds have been using alternative data for the last 15 years, the private equity community has been a much slower adopter. But with an uptick in data science headcount in the private equity sector, it suggests the narrative is about to change. This article discusses the challenges PE investors face in using alternative data to drive returns and gives some examples of the essential dataset types that all private equity investors should consider for sourcing, due diligence and portfolio performance.

Private markets investors are increasingly seeking to build an information mosaic in-house by leveraging alternative data, including for due diligence, post-deal value creation and investment benchmarking. While saving consulting fees, alternative data vendors also offer additional angles and a means to assess target companies beyond more traditional deal-sourcing platforms. Although due diligence is case-specific, this report offers some ideas to help private markets investors validate or challenge their assumptions during the process.

Global labour markets have been facing increasing pressure. Skills shortages and imbalances in the demand-supply of labour have been driving inflationary pressures. More recently, recessionary conditions have increased concerns of mass layoffs.

Technical and theoretical advancements over the past two decades, coupled with open-source software, has fueled an explosion of sentiment data providers. In this report, we provide a lay of the land, focusing on the three key types of sentiment vendors based on underlying source - news content, social media, and investor communications. Within each category, we highlight use cases, trends, and prominent players.