Jonathan
Sherry

The Problem He Refused to Leave Alone

Here is the number that keeps Jonathan Sherry up at night: 12.7%. That's the share of software vendors in Alium's database who earn a buyer satisfaction score of 8 or higher. The rest - an overwhelming 87.3% - fall short of what the people actually using their tools would call genuinely good partners.

Marketing teams at enterprise companies don't even use 44% of the software they've purchased, according to The CMO Survey. Billions of dollars sitting in licenses, untouched, because the buying decision was made with bad information.

Sherry saw this problem clearly from two vantage points: first as a consultant watching financial institutions wrestle with vendor choices at Deloitte; then for over a decade as co-founder and COO of CB Insights, where he watched the enterprise intelligence market develop a structural flaw that no one seemed willing to call out.

Gartner, Forrester, and their peers charge vendors for placement and charge buyers for access. Both sides are paying for the same report. The vendor who pays more gets a rosier narrative. The buyer doesn't know who funded the research they're relying on to make a six-figure software decision.

Alium's answer is structurally different: give buyers access for free. Build a buyer network of 500+ decision-makers from Fortune 1000 companies - Walmart, Nike, Marriott Bonvoy, Spotify, JetBlue, Best Buy, L'Oreal, CVS, Macy's, Citi, PepsiCo. Interview them in depth. Then sell the aggregated, AI-analyzed insights to vendors who want to understand what their actual customers think.

No pay-to-play placement. No sponsored white papers. Just what brand leaders say in structured conversations when they're being honest about what it's really like to work with a given vendor.

Spreadsheets, Interns, and a Near-Catastrophe

In 2007, Sherry was working on the American Express Chairman's Innovation Fund - a $50 million pool of capital that AmEx had set aside to invest in businesses disrupting adjacent markets. It was there he met Anand Sanwal. Both of them saw the same gap: the venture and startup intelligence market was fragmented, slow, and mostly guesswork.

They left AmEx in 2008 to fix it. The timing was, generously speaking, not ideal. The Global Financial Crisis arrived within months.

They didn't just survive. Over eleven years, Sherry grew CB Insights to 250+ employees, eight-figure revenue, and an inbound demand generation machine producing more than 30,000 new leads every single month. He served as COO and later Board Member, overseeing everything from sales and marketing to engineering, data infrastructure, executive recruiting, finance, and HR. AmEx was eventually recognized by Fortune as "Most Admired for Innovation" - in part because of the very fund Sherry helped build before leaving.

When he departed in 2021, CB Insights had become the bible for anyone trying to understand what was happening in venture capital. Sherry had spent over a decade building a product that made market intelligence better. The next question was where the intelligence market was still broken.

Four Years in Stealth, Then a Different Kind of Launch

Alium started in 2020 - quietly. Sherry co-founded the company with Alexandre Testu, an early engineer from CB Insights. For four years, no press releases, no funding announcements, no LinkedIn posts about disruption. Just building.

On January 15, 2025, Alium went public. The announcement came with $7 million in seed funding from Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners. By that point, Alium had already conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews and built a buyer network that reads like a Fortune 500 vendor wishlist.

The buyer side is free and invitation-only. Alium's network spans 500+ decision-makers from brands with $10M+ in revenue. They participate in structured interviews about their vendor relationships - what's working, what isn't, and what they'd actually recommend to peers. The resulting database is what vendors pay to access.

The A-List Report, released February 12, 2025, was the first public demonstration of the methodology: 700+ practitioner interviews, 20 winning vendors across the martech and ecommerce technology landscape, with Gorgias ranking first. No vendor paid to be included. No analyst opinion shaped the results. The rankings are the math that falls out of what practitioners said in private conversations.

Jason Grunberg, Chief Commercial Officer at Bluecore, put it plainly: "Alium has become a 'must-have' for my team, and it's my most recommended addition to the stack in my own peer conversations."

The Long Road to the Right Problem

Vendor Satisfaction: What Real Buyers Actually Say

The Alium A-List ranking formula is built from practitioner interviews, not sponsored placements. Here's the distribution of vendor satisfaction scores across Alium's database - proof of why the problem Sherry is solving is real:

Source: Alium buyer interview database - approximate distribution based on published statistics

Half of all vendors score a 5 or below. Fewer than 1 in 8 earn genuine buyer enthusiasm. These aren't survey responses - they're conclusions from structured, hour-long conversations with the actual practitioners living with these tools every day.

What You Don't Learn in the Press Release

Sherry grew up in Freehold, New Jersey. He's married to Melissa, has two kids, and when asked the classic "one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses" hypothetical - a CB Insights team tradition - gave the only answer that reveals anything real about who he is: he would confit the legs and thighs of the oversized duck, pan-roast the breast to a perfect medium-rare, and host a dinner party for 25 friends.

This is not a man who fights battles for their own sake. He turns them into experiences worth sharing.

He's a New Jersey Devils hockey fan, skis in Park City in March, bikes and runs, and is currently learning the ukulele - which, for a Penn electrical engineering graduate who co-founded two data companies, is either a very surprising hobby or exactly the right one. He also invests in Broadway productions, which slots neatly between "loves the art form" and "understands narrative arcs."

Alium's company sits at 27 employees as of mid-2026. It is not a company built to be large for its own sake. Sherry has been explicit about the model: interviews, not algorithms; practitioner trust, not vendor fees; peer networks, not pay-to-play placements. The size of the company reflects a deliberate choice to build something where quality control is possible.

He's also a Board Member at Collage Group, a consumer insights and data company, and advises the portfolios of both Wavecrest Growth Partners and Pilot Growth Equity. The pattern is consistent: companies trying to turn real human data into actionable intelligence.

That thread - from the manually updated venture spreadsheets at CB Insights' beginning, to the structured practitioner interviews at Alium - is the through-line of a career built not around what's fashionable in enterprise software, but around one honest question: where is the information actually broken, and how do you fix it?

Who Bet $7M on Peer Intelligence

Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners led the January 2025 seed round. Primary Venture Partners has been in since 2020 - Cassie Young was the investor who backed Alium during the stealth years, before there was a press release, before there was an A-List, before any of it was public.

That's a meaningful data point. The investors who know Sherry's track record at CB Insights - watching him build from near-bankruptcy to eight-figure revenue - didn't wait for Alium to prove itself publicly. They backed the problem and the person four years before the world heard about it.

Total confirmed funding across all rounds: $10.25 million.