Mark O’Hare and
the price of knowing

Mark O’Hare once invested in a business without understanding how it would make money. The idea sounded agreeable: three-dimensional images of rooms for architects and interior designers. It was the dot-com era. Other people appeared to be getting rich. He had recently sold a financial information company. Surely he could allow himself a little enthusiasm.

The business went broke. Years later, when an interviewer presented his career as a sequence of entrepreneurial successes, O’Hare corrected the premise. He had failures, too. His lesson was brisk: “only invest in businesses you understand”. A useful admission from someone who went on to sell information to people deciding where to put their money. Even the proprietor of the map can take a wrong turning.

O’Hare co-founded Preqin in 2003. BlackRock completed its acquisition of the company in March 2025, and he joined as Vice Chair. The agreed purchase price was £2.55 billion in cash. Between those two dates lies a career spent attending to a deceptively simple difficulty: money moves through places that are surprisingly hard to see.

A mathematician goes looking for the owners

Before the databases came mathematics and mathematical statistics at Cambridge. O’Hare graduated with first-class honours, won the Stokes Prize and rowed in his college’s first eight. He later studied finance at London Business School. There is a pleasing combination here: abstract reasoning, then a boat in which an individual’s brilliance is of limited use unless everybody else is moving in time.

His early professional life was at Boston Consulting Group. As a manager, he advised businesses in Europe, the United States and Africa. He subsequently founded the strategy consultancy Goodall Alexander O’Hare & Co. These were jobs built around understanding how businesses worked before offering an opinion about what they should do next.

In 1993, he founded Citywatch, a service tracking share ownership in British listed companies. Reuters acquired it in 1998. The subject was public equities; the commercial opportunity was better information about who owned them. Years before Preqin, he had found a business in making the ownership of businesses easier to follow.

The connection matters. A database can look like a rather bloodless product from the outside. For the customer, however, its contents might determine whom to call, which relationship to pursue or what question to ask in a meeting. O’Hare’s early success came from organizing information around a professional need. The dot-com detour supplied an expensive reminder to inspect the need as carefully as the idea.

The public door into private money

Preqin began as Private Equity Intelligence, founded by O’Hare and Nick Arnott with a team of five. The name offered very little room for misunderstanding. Its first product, Performance Analyst, assembled private-equity fund performance information using freedom-of-information legislation in Britain and the United States to obtain records from public pension plans.

That was an ingenious place to begin. A private fund could have a public institution among its investors. The institution’s records offered a way into a market whose participants did not publish information in the familiar manner of listed companies. The resulting picture could be assembled fund by fund, rather than accepted on the strength of a sales presentation.

More products followed: information about managers seeking capital, and about institutions investing in private equity. Coverage widened to real estate in 2006, hedge funds in 2007, infrastructure in 2008 and private debt in 2014. O’Hare and Arnott had begun with a specific information problem. The adjacent problems kept arriving.

This is a revealing form of entrepreneurship. The work does not end when the first answer is sold. A record needs updating. A new fund needs adding. A changed mandate needs recording. The recurring inconvenience is also the recurring reason to subscribe. There is little theatrical glamour in keeping a database current, which may explain why the theatre enters this story elsewhere.

A bigger number can be a worse answer

O’Hare’s thinking about information goes beyond acquiring more of it. His 2019 discussion of data collection examined the awkward decisions that sit between a raw record and a usable conclusion. Different investors can report different returns from the same fund because their commitments and terms differ. A number is not self-explanatory simply because it has decimal places.

He also challenged the appeal of inflated counts. Multiple share classes or related corporate entities can make a database appear larger without representing more independent funds or decision makers. For someone trying to find an investor, ten entries that lead to one investment office are a surprisingly elaborate route to a single telephone call.

That argument gives his career a more interesting texture than a simple celebration of scale. The seller of financial data was explaining why buyers should question what a count represents. The useful unit is the thing a customer can understand and act upon. Counting requires judgement about the world being counted.

“only invest in businesses you understand”

Mark O’Hare, 2023

By Preqin’s twentieth anniversary in 2023, its original five-person team had grown to about 1,500 people across 16 offices. It served more than 200,000 professionals. Its anniversary account returned to the founders’ priorities of data quality and attention to customers. The scale had changed; the stated obligations sounded much the same.

There had also been a change at the top. Christoph Knaack succeeded O’Hare as chief executive, effective 1 January 2022. O’Hare remained a founder and board member. A founder’s relationship with a business can continue after someone else takes charge of its daily operation. In his case, the public conversation increasingly concerned the direction of private markets and the information they would require.

The buyer wanted the numbers closer to the decisions

BlackRock’s purchase placed Preqin alongside Aladdin and eFront, the investment technology platforms through which institutions manage portfolios. At completion, Preqin covered 210,000 funds and had more than 220,000 users. BlackRock said the standalone service would continue while its data and research tools were integrated with the wider technology offering.

The practical attraction is easy to grasp. Information is more convenient when it is available where a decision is being made. Moving between databases, spreadsheets and portfolio systems adds work. Bringing fund information and benchmarks into investment software makes the business O’Hare helped build part of a larger working routine.

By November 2025, O’Hare was describing Preqin benchmarks already available to Aladdin customers. He still considered private-market information less transparent than public-market information. His ambitions involved improving the underlying records, turning them into useful tools and distributing the resulting insights more effectively.

His view of artificial intelligence was practical rather than ornamental. Private-market reports arrive in inconsistent formats. Extracting information is one task; checking whether it makes sense is another. In discussing AI, he connected the technology to the existing work of data acquisition and verification. The question remained what an investor could reliably do with the result.

The next cheque followed a familiar interest

Valhalla Ventures, the O’Hare family holding company, had been Preqin’s majority owner before the BlackRock acquisition. Its published approach emphasizes patience and investment in areas where the family has experience. It lists interests in data and technology companies, private-capital funds and co-investments, with no requirement for a short route to an exit.

In March 2026, a funding round led by Mark and Lindy O’Hare’s Valhalla put £14 million into Avvoka, a legal-document automation business founded by former lawyers Eliot Benzecrit and David Howorth. Avvoka had previously raised £600,000 from angels. The new money was intended to support expansion in the United States and development of its drafting platform.

O’Hare’s stated interest was in the systems underneath legal drafting. Law firms hold expertise in precedents and accumulated knowledge; the challenge is using it repeatedly while retaining control. After years helping organize investment information, he was backing a company organizing another profession’s working material. The continuity is in the practical problem: expertise is more useful when people can retrieve it, structure it and use it again.

And then there was the wood

In Suffolk, the family’s interests take a different physical form. Mark and Lindy own Thorington Theatre, an outdoor venue built into a natural bowl in woodland. Lindy’s account credits several people with seeing its potential, including local carpenter and event designer Silas Rayner. She says Mark suggested using timber coppiced on the farm to build it.

The theatre opened in 2021 with a local children’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its own construction story describes the site as a Second World War bomb crater and records the use of surrounding chestnut trees. Tiered seating gave the hollow an audience. The woods supplied the building material. An apparently awkward patch of ground acquired a programme.

There is a temptation to make every private interest explain a business career. A theatre need not be an allegory for a database. Still, both projects began by seeing a use for something others might pass: scattered investment records in one case, a depression in the woods in the other. Each needed people willing to perform the less romantic work of putting it together.

The family’s cultural support extends to Britten Pears Arts, which lists Lindy and Mark among donors to its capital programme at Snape Maltings. In 2026, the refurbished Britten Pears Building reopened as the home of the O’Hare Music Centre. Alongside the company sales and investment rounds sits this quieter record of places where other people can make something.

O’Hare’s career has produced some very large numbers. The more revealing habit is his interest in what makes them useful: who owns the shares, how a fund performed, where a professional keeps their knowledge. His dot-com cheque is the uncomfortable companion to that habit. He could recognize an attractive idea and still fail to understand the business. He kept the lesson, and eventually put a rather substantial business behind it.