AlphaSense doubled their ARR to over $200m in under two years

In the DaaS Unicorns overview we published last week, AlphaSense stood out having closed three of the top five DaaS funding rounds over the last two years, and exceeding $200 million in ARR.

Founded in 2011 by Wharton MBA graduates Jack Kokko and Raj Neervannan the New York- based market intelligence platform has been making waves in the business intelligence sector with its AI-powered insights. In an interview with AlleyWatch, AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko reminisced how the tedium of data collection while working as financial analyst at Morgan Stanley spurred the creation of the company.

“It was truly impossible to capture every data point that could be impactful,” Kokko said, the CEO of the company.

After meeting Neervannan at Wharton, the two began creating a search engine that uses machine learning and natural language processing technology - with the ultimate goal of allowing its customers to oversee billions of data points seamlessly.

When building AlphaSense, Kokko and Neervannan made sure to target all verticals that rely heavily on research expanding past traditional buy side research.

“Our platform appeals to knowledge workers across a wide range of roles including strategy, competitive intelligence, investor relations, corporate development, and financial analysis,” Kokko said. 

It currently has over 4,000 corporate customers, including the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, HSBC and Samsung.

Pioneering AI-Powered Market Intelligence

AlphaSense has been at the forefront of AI adoption in the market intelligence sector, leveraging artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) technologies long before they became industry buzzwords. The company's early commitment to AI has allowed them to develop a suite of powerful tools that set them apart in the business intelligence landscape. At the core of AlphaSense's AI capabilities is their patented Smart Synonyms™ technology, which expands searches beyond exact matches by analyzing speech patterns across millions of documents.

Building on this foundation, AlphaSense developed its own proprietary large language model, ASLLM, in 2023, specifically designed for market intelligence professionals.The company has continued to innovate, introducing AI-powered features such as Smart Summaries, which quickly synthesizes key insights from lengthy documents, and AlphaSense Assistant, an AI chatbot that provides real-time answers based on the platform's vast content library.

Additionally, their Enterprise Intelligence offering applies AI capabilities to both external and internal content, allowing businesses to centralize their market intelligence and extract insights from proprietary data.

“Today, more than 1,000 of our enterprise clients are securely searching across their internal content with AlphaSense—from deal data rooms to investment memos and other large troves of internal insights—and finding key data with great speed and reliability," Kokko commented on the AI tool. "We couldn't be more excited to roll out the generative AI and chat capabilities of AlphaSense Assistant to clients - delivering on the vision of seamlessly finding internal and external insights from thousands of sources all in one place, with powerful search and AI technology on top."

The Billion Dollar Tegus Purchase

In one of the largest DaasS deals of the years, earlier this year Alphasense acquired Tegus for nearly $1bn.

Tegus’ financial data access covers over 35,000 companies in verticals such as energy, telecom, and life sciences. 

“This transaction marks a pivotal moment for AlphaSense in our mission to help businesses and investors make better decisions with confidence and speed," Kokko said. "I am thrilled to join forces with the Tegus team as a significant leap forward in furthering our mission, adding top-quality content on public and private companies, and enhancing our ability to deliver even more comprehensive insights to our customers around the world."

The acquisition, which was finalized in July, diversifies its already extensive portfolio of customers. With the combination of AlphaSense’s AI tools and Tegus’ vast content library what’s left?

Is IPO Next?

Although AlphaSense hasn’t appointed advisors for an IPO yet, sources and numerous analysts say that the company is expected to go public in two years. 

“Our future is full of possibilities,” Kokko said. “We have very high ambitions for the business; and with our recent financing, we now have the fuel to go realize them. At this point, it’s all about execution.”

AlphaSense wept as there were no more for there were no more worlds to conquer.