Andrew Bocskocsky went looking for overlooked companies

A napkin, a plate of pad thai, and two founders explaining the company they wanted to build. Nicole Bocskocsky’s earliest memory of Grata has the appropriate startup stationery, but a rather better menu. Andrew Bocskocsky and Nevin Raj were sketching a business around a stubborn problem: finding useful information about private companies. The internet had plenty of businesses on it. Finding the right ones still involved an unreasonable amount of human excavation.

Her recollection includes the less photogenic parts: debugging at three in the morning, the long search for product-market fit, and dinners delayed because Andrew needed to beat Nevin at Mario Kart. A founder can apparently tolerate an unfinished market map more easily than an unfinished race. Those details give the Grata story its scale. A company is built in funding rounds and product releases, certainly, but also in the hours other people spend waiting for you.

A family connection to the moon

Bocskocsky grew up in Westchester, New York, in a household where computers and technology were familiar company. His grandfather worked on the Apollo lunar module. There is a pleasing family progression here: one generation helped engineers reach the moon; another would help investors locate a private business whose website was three search results beyond their patience. The destinations differ. Both reward getting the information right.

At Harvard, Bocskocsky studied economics, graduating in 2013 with a secondary field in computer science. That combination would prove useful. Economics asks how people and markets behave; computing offers ways to investigate the answer. His later work would sit comfortably between the two, treating information as something that must be collected and made useful before anyone can act on it.

First, question the scoreboard

One early investigation took place on a basketball court, at least in the data. With John Ezekowitz and Carolyn Stein, Bocskocsky co-authored research on the hot hand: the disputed idea that a player who has been making shots becomes more likely to make the next one. Their 2014 paper examined more than 83,000 shots from the 2012-13 NBA season, alongside optical tracking information about players and the ball.

The complication was shot selection. A player feeling hot might shoot from farther away or face closer defense. Simply counting makes and misses could therefore conceal something worth measuring. The researchers found evidence of a hot-hand effect after controlling for shot difficulty. The result came with models and qualifications, as good research tends to do. Basketball arguments are more sociable when nobody brings a regression, but considerably less precise.

Read beside his later business, the paper offers an interesting echo. A headline number can leave out the detail that explains it. That connection is a way of reading his work, rather than a claim that Grata began on a basketball court.

The web had the clues

His early professional experience included engineering at Palantir and building Gramercy360, a business working on data infrastructure and analytical systems. An early sports-conference biography describes software work for clients in publishing, real estate, fashion, and social media. It also records his pursuit of Frustum, software for architects and engineers. This was a builder moving among practical problems, learning what clients needed their systems to do.

Meanwhile, Raj had encountered the private-company research problem through consulting and investing. The two Harvard classmates arrived at a common frustration from different desks. A company could have customers, products, and years of operating history yet remain awkward to identify through the available research tools. Being a real business did not guarantee being a readily searchable one.

Bocskocsky’s consulting work made the gap concrete. Clients wanted private-company intelligence, while the available data could be stale or wrong. Company websites offered another route: businesses were describing themselves online in their own words. Those descriptions contained useful distinctions, if someone could collect and interpret them at scale.

A list before a search box

Grata was founded in 2016. Its early service was decidedly hands-on: the founders sent clients lists of prospective businesses. The search engine came later. There is something reassuring about a technology company beginning with a deliverable a customer can open and inspect. A list makes the promise testable. Either the businesses belong on it, or they do not.

Raj later described roughly four years of operating the bootstrapped Grata Data business before the subscription software took shape. In his account, subscriptions were being sold in early 2020 while coverage was still being built. Customers could find value in a useful portion of the market before the company had indexed the entire ambition. Completion, for a search business, is a remarkably demanding entrance requirement.

By October 2020, Grata had raised $3.2 million in seed funding. The progression from delivered lists to a tool customers could search themselves changed the founders’ relationship with the work. Each new research question no longer had to arrive as a request for another bespoke list. Software let customers ask their own questions.

“Find the hidden gems.”

Andrew Bocskocsky, 2020

He wanted search to finish the job

Bocskocsky laid out his thinking about specialized search in 2020. A search engine built for a particular field could supply deeper information and fit the task its user was trying to complete. Housing and travel provided familiar examples. Someone comparing homes eventually wants to arrange a viewing; someone comparing flights hopes, generally, to leave. The useful product understands that destination.

Applied to private companies, the same thinking puts pressure on a result. A business name is a beginning. A dealmaker needs to understand why that business fits a thesis, how it differs from its neighbors, and whether it deserves a conversation. Search becomes more valuable as it removes the labor between curiosity and a considered next step.

That perspective also explains his interest in small and medium businesses. He encouraged leaders to look for unfamiliar family-run companies and to grow alongside customers with potential. The object was practical: make it possible to discover companies that a conventional research process might pass over. An obscure name can still belong to a substantial business.

Growth, with a measurement attached

In 2022, Grata announced a $25 million Series A led by Craft Ventures. Bocskocsky reported that annual recurring revenue had grown eightfold in 2021. His advice to companies without new capital was more restrained than the fundraising headline: make bets, measure them, and keep expenditure under control. “Experiment, measure, repeat.” It is a compact instruction, with very little room for a celebratory yacht.

The investor relationship had been developing for some time. Craft reached out after the 2020 seed round, giving both sides a chance to become acquainted before the Series A. That detail matters in a story about discovery. Finding a promising company and deciding to back it are different stages; time spent understanding the people and the business still counts.

The scale of the workplace changed too. In 2024, Grata signed for 15,158 square feet at 1410 Broadway in New York. Bocskocsky described the attraction in terms of customer proximity and space for collaboration. A company devoted to digital discovery was still investing in the advantages of people sharing a room.

The people behind the query

His reflection on 2023 gave considerable attention to the work around the software. Grata had more than doubled its product interviews, training, support, onboarding, and business reviews. The point of those conversations was to understand whether customers were getting value. Listening takes time that cannot be compressed quite as neatly as a search query.

The company also supported Grata Scholars and Emerging Manager programs, connecting its business to people entering dealmaking and building funds. In that account, community was part of how the company operated. Software could improve discovery, while relationships helped its makers understand what users needed next.

These details complicate the portrait of an automation founder in a useful way. His product reduces manual research; his account of company building makes room for repeated human contact. The work saved in one place can be spent more thoughtfully elsewhere. A fast answer is useful. Knowing which question your customer actually needed answered is useful too.

From finding a company to following a deal

Datasite acquired Grata in June 2025, with Bocskocsky and Raj continuing to lead it as a business unit. CapVest, Datasite’s controlling shareholder, announced an intention to invest $500 million in expanding the group’s intelligence solutions through organic growth and acquisitions. The commitment described future investment across those solutions. It was not a disclosed purchase price for Grata.

The next stage gave Bocskocsky a wider brief. On September 29, 2026, Datasite appointed him Chief Product Officer, responsible for its product organization and for bringing its capabilities together into a connected private-markets platform. Grata’s co-founder was now working on the relationship between finding an opportunity and managing what happened afterward.

October’s introduction of Grata Intelligence makes that direction tangible. The workspace brings company information together with a firm’s own knowledge and deal materials, with Blueflame supporting research and deal workflows. The ambition has expanded from discovering a business to carrying useful context through the transaction.

There is a long distance between a prospect list and that product brief. Bocskocsky has traveled it by returning to a fairly durable question: what important detail has the current view left out? On the basketball court, it was the difficulty of the shot. In company research, it was the business beyond the familiar names. The napkin has acquired rather more columns. There is still room for another question.