alternative-data
(7)
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.
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.
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.