alternative-data
(12)
TransUnion
The quiet third name on your credit report runs a billion-consumer data engine. Here is how a 1968 railcar spinoff became a Tru-branded machine for deciding who gets to borrow, rent and buy.
Cohesion
Cohesion is a New York-based Y Combinator (P26) startup building AI agents that automate research for institutional investors. Its agentic teammate monitors the companies an analyst covers - tracking earnings, news, and non-traditional datasets like podcasts and X/Twitter - and surfaces differentiated insights purpose-built for public equity investing. Founded by ex-hedge-fund analyst Devon Krapcho with engineers from AWS and T. Rowe Price, Cohesion is already live with 10+ long/short and long-only fundamental funds managing a combined $10B+ in assets.
Apptopia
Apptopia is a Boston-based mobile app intelligence company that turns billions of app performance signals into investor-grade data. Using machine learning and a real-user device panel of 15M+ devices, it estimates downloads, revenue, usage and engagement across thousands of public and private apps, then packages those signals for institutional investors, brands and publishers. More than 200 financial firms use Apptopia to read consumer behavior ahead of earnings, and its metrics are distributed through the Bloomberg Terminal.
Omnisient - Collaborative Consumer Intelligence
Omnisient is a privacy-preserving data collaboration company that lets banks, insurers, retailers and consumer brands analyze their first-party data together without ever sharing or exposing it. Using privacy enhancing technologies, US-patented Crypto-IDs and AI-powered data clean rooms, the platform matches mutual customers across datasets so lenders can score credit-invisible and thin-file consumers using alternative behavioral data - all while personal information never leaves the owner's environment. Founded in Cape Town and now expanding into the United States, the company protects hundreds of millions of consumer records for more than 100 enterprises.
Jon Jacobson
Jon Jacobson is the co-founder, Group CEO and CTO of Omnisient, a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that lets banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations share and analyze consumer data without exposing raw personal information. A software engineer with more than 25 years building data platforms, he founded Omnisient in South Africa in 2019 to attack a specific problem: nearly two billion people are shut out of affordable financial services because they lack the behavioral data lenders use to assess risk. His platform uses cryptography to tokenize and match datasets locally, turning loyalty-card and retail data into alternative credit signals.
Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay is the co-founder and CEO of Apptopia, a Boston-based app intelligence company that turns mobile app data into signals used by investors, brands and developers. He started Apptopia in 2011 as an online marketplace for buying and selling apps, backed early by Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher, then rebuilt it into a data business whose forecasts and estimates are relied on by clients including Google, Visa, Target, Microsoft, Zoom and NBC. Kay took over as CEO in 2021 as the company raised a $20 million Series C and doubled down on serving hedge funds and public-market investors with predictive mobile metrics.
Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie, a New York-based data and analytics company that has become a core information provider for institutional crypto investors. The Tie's SigDev Terminal and APIs deliver real-time sentiment, news, and market data to hedge funds, trading desks, banks, and exchanges. Frank left a post-trade consulting role at SS&C Technologies in 2018 to build the company full time, and has since grown it into one of the most widely used data platforms serving the professional side of digital assets.
Nomad Data
Nomad Data is a New York-based AI platform that helps companies find, buy, and understand external data. Founded in 2020 by Brad Schneider and Justin Manikas, it began as a marketplace matching data buyers to a network of thousands of providers - buyers submit a use case, and providers respond with data that can actually solve it. The platform has since expanded into an AI layer for reading unstructured documents (its Doc Chat product) and managing data relationships, serving hedge funds, private equity, insurance, and asset-management firms that spend heavily on third-party data.
Brad Schneider
Brad Schneider is the founder and CEO of Nomad Data, a New York based AI platform that helps teams find, buy, and read the data hidden inside documents and external vendors. An MIT-trained engineer turned hedge fund investor (Tiger Management, Jericho Capital) and CFA charterholder, he spent a decade using alternative data to beat markets before deciding the harder problem was simply finding the right data in the first place. Nomad Data lets users describe what they need in plain English and routes them to answers, not raw spreadsheets, with products spanning data discovery, a Doc Chat engine for unstructured text, and vendor relationship management for consultancies, insurers, and asset managers.
Estimize
Estimize is a financial estimates platform that crowdsources earnings-per-share and revenue forecasts from a community of more than 120,000 contributors - including buy-side, sell-side and independent analysts, students, academics and private investors. By aggregating and weighting these estimates, Estimize produces a consensus that has repeatedly proven more accurate and more timely than the traditional Wall Street sell-side consensus, and sells that data to hedge funds, asset managers and quantitative researchers. Since 2021 it has operated as part of alternative-data and quant research firm ExtractAlpha.
Heka Global
Heka Global is a New York and Tel Aviv based fintech that turns scattered public web signals into structured, explainable consumer profiles for financial institutions. Its AI-driven web intelligence engine helps banks, insurers and pension providers detect fraud, verify identities, reconnect dormant accounts and underwrite thin-file customers - using a proprietary database of millions of records plus live open-web data. Heka raised a $14M Series A in July 2025 led by Windare Ventures with participation from Barclays and Corn`er Banca.
Vinesh Jha
Vinesh Jha is the founder and CEO of ExtractAlpha, an independent alternative-data research firm that turns messy datasets into tradable signals for hedge funds and institutional investors. A pure-mathematician-turned-quant, he cut his teeth ranking Wall Street analysts at StarMine, built systematic strategies at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and PDT Partners, then went out on his own in 2013. After ExtractAlpha merged with the crowdsourced-estimates platform Estimize in 2021, he runs both, leading a team spread across Hong Kong, the US, Europe, and Canada with a near-religious insistence on rigorous, point-in-time testing over a good story.