AlphaSense: The AI startup building the B2B Google

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(3 minute read)

• This AI startup plans to be the Google for businesses

• Their enterprise customers include 85% of the S&P 100

• They recently crossed $200M in ARR, doubling their revenue in less than 2 years

• They’ve raised a total of $1.4B with their latest valuation at $4B

_{📚 *Read till the end to find a book recommendation given by this founder…}

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? This is the story of AlphaSense 📈

AlphaSense was founded in 2008 by Jack Kokko and Raj Neervannan to revolutionize search for businesses. 

AlphaSense is a search engine for market intelligence - leveraging AI to help businesses acquire information more efficiently and help them make better decisions. 🤖 

This means that pretty much any business with some degree of complexity and scale would benefit from AlphaSense. It helps businesses understand their competitive landscape, and gives them info about their customers, suppliers, product ecosystems etc.

Their Information sources come from a combination of:

1. 🗞️ Publicly Available Info: Public company filings, news sites, investor relations pages etc.

2. 🔒 Private data: Proprietary info from private subscriptions

Early Beginnings🐣 

Before AlphaSense, Jack was an analyst at Morgan Stanley working long hours, nights and weekends.

His job was to practically gather information to help clients do M&A deals, and evaluate company strategies and plans. 

He then realized how frustrating it was to find all this information with speed and precision. Jack even felt nervous walking into client board meetings, always fearing he missed something important out.

The process of finding documents and information was very manual - a lot of legacy solutions and tools were used at the time.

Morgan Stanley even gave analysts the best tools money could buy, but these were still too basic - they weren't able to scour vast volumes of documents at the same time. They could only search one document at a time.

After being an analyst, Jack didn’t really think about this issue and went on to start Silecs, a startup innovating on semiconductors through molecular engineering.

He worked on this for 8 years raising over $37M, however it wasn’t a huge success and ended up being acquired by another semiconductor firm.

While working on Silecs, Jack did an MBA at Wharton where he met his co-founder Raj. 🎓 As soon as they graduated in 2008, they started working on AlphaSense.

• 🫤 The problem: There was no way to search across vast volumes of business documents at the same time with precision and speed. Traditional solutions and providers weren’t even trying to solve the problem.

• 💡 The solution: AlphaSense.

AlphaSense is thought of as the B2B Google. Google was solving this issue on the consumer side, and AlphaSense on the business side.

AlphaSense gathered information from thousands of sources, millions of documents and billions of data points. They then used AI and Machine Learning to understand this data based on algorithms.

This helped them become the best tool out there to search for any business-related data.

Timeline & Stats 📊

By 2011, AlphaSense had built all the basic tech and started testing with an MVP. 

By 2013, AlphaSense had raised their first seed round of $1.7M, which helped them grow rapidly.

💸 By 2021, AlphaSense had reached unicorn status, raising $180M from investors like Citi, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. They’d also officially hit $100M in revenue and acquired Stream - the largest in-depth expert interview library.

🤝 Fast forward to 2024, AlphaSense has just raised $650M at a $4B valuation to acquire their biggest competitor - Tegus for $930M. 

This has cemented AlphaSense as the clear market leader in the market intelligence space. 

📈 AlphaSense is now used by over 4,000 enterprise clients including: 85% of the S&P 100, 80% of the top asset management firms and consultancies, and 85% of top healthcare companies.

They’re currently doing over $200M in ARR, which is up over 100% in the past 2 years and have continued to grow at this pace.

📊 They've also been named to the CNBC Disruptors 50 List in 2024 for being one of the most disruptive private startups.

_{*Book Recommendation by Jack: ‘Amp it up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity’ By Frank Slootman - Chairman and CEO of SnowFlake}

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