investment-research
(17)
Preqin’s £2.5 billion business: knowing what private money is doing
Preqin built a business answering the questions private markets prefer to leave complicated. Now BlackRock is putting its data inside the software investors use to choose funds, measure returns and follow the money.
FE fundinfo and the business of getting the numbers straight
Before a fund reaches an investor, its data has a lot of travelling to do. FE fundinfo has built a business around making sure the same facts survive the trip.
Arbolus wants the answers before the expert call
An expert network built a business around finding people to interview. Now Arbolus is turning their knowledge into a customer library - and making the live call earn its place.
Dynamic Planner built a business on the second opinion
People wanted a human to check the computer’s financial advice. Dynamic Planner turned that habit into a software business, then rebuilt it when its original customers changed course.
Consumer Edge Turned Your Receipts Into Wall Street's Early-Warning System
Consumer Edge began as one analyst's escape from Wall Street turf wars. Now it turns card swipes, receipts and web traffic into an unusually practical answer to the question every brand and investor asks: what is the customer doing before the quarter closes?
Behind the Markets Sells Retail Investors the Stocks Wall Street Skips - But the Real Product Is Conviction
Dylan Jovine built a Florida research shop around a sharp observation: big funds ignore thousands of smaller companies. The opportunity is real, the subscriptions can cost thousands, and the uncomfortable part is knowing when conviction has become marketing.
YipitData’s Coupon Business Died. The Data Exhaust Became a $1 Billion Company
Yipit started by saving shoppers from coupon-email purgatory. When daily deals cooled, its founders discovered that hedge funds would pay far more for the machinery underneath - a pivot worth studying by anyone sitting on an overlooked data asset.
The startup teaching AI to hire humans
A former DeepMind scientist and a SoftBank operator built voice AI that interviews people about what they are actually good at - then sells that expertise to hedge funds, AI labs and consultancies. Andreessen Horowitz just put in $22.75M.
The Financial Terminal That Started on a Bicycle
Before FactSet became a $2.3 billion data business, its product arrived as four sheets of paper by bicycle messenger. The delivery method changed; the useful idea did not.
Morningstar
Forty years ago Joe Mansueto sorted mutual fund reports on his apartment floor and decided regular people deserved the same research Wall Street kept for itself. The five-star rating that came out of it now shapes how trillions of dollars get invested.
Clarum
Clarum is a San Francisco AI startup (YC W24) building the intelligence layer for private capital. It began as an AI associate that compresses private-equity due diligence from weeks into minutes, letting firms upload data rooms and questionnaires and get transparent, sourced answers to hundreds of questions. It has since broadened toward structuring a firm's proprietary documents - deal memos, diligence notes, returns data - into a unified model that AI agents can query, so investors can finally ask cross-portfolio questions that were previously buried in files.
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.
DiligenceSquared
DiligenceSquared is a New York AI company that automates commercial due diligence for investors. Its AI agents run expert interviews with customers, competitors, and market specialists, then synthesize the findings into interactive reports where every claim links back to a source transcript. Founded by two ex-Blackstone and ex-BCG private equity operators plus a former Google engineer, it delivers consulting-grade market research for a fraction of the $500K-$1M that firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG typically charge.
Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze)
Nitrogen, formerly Riskalyze, is an Auburn, California wealth-management software company that helps financial advisors grow their firms. It invented the Risk Number, a way to quantify an investor's risk tolerance and align it with their portfolio, and has expanded into a connected suite covering proposal generation, investment research, financial planning, client engagement, compliance and AI-assisted advisor workflows. More than five million investors have received a Risk Number, and the platform snaps into the gap between a firm's marketing, CRM and asset platforms to create a consistent client experience.
Menos AI
Menos AI is a San Jose-based, AI-native fintech building institutional-grade artificial intelligence for hedge funds and asset managers. Founded in 2024 by a team of quant and AI practitioners, its flagship product Sonar is an intelligent research agent that uses proprietary Alpha Signal Extraction technology to surface timely, differentiated investment ideas from the flood of financial data. The company raised a $5.2M oversubscribed seed round in 2025 and positions its platform as an augmentation layer for investment teams - secure, auditable, and designed to integrate with existing workflows rather than replace the humans who use it.
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.
Raylu
Raylu is a New York-based AI company building an AI-native deal origination platform for private-market investors. It turns an investment thesis into a custom market map, enriched company intelligence, and verified founder outreach in minutes rather than weeks - work that traditionally takes analysts days. Used by 45+ funds representing over $500B in AUM, Raylu raised an $8M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to $12M.