Reflections on a Transformative Year: AlphaSense in 2021

2021 has been a truly transformative year in our decade-long history as a company.

As I’ve been reflecting on all that has been accomplished this year, I am deeply grateful for the dedication and hard work of our team throughout this unusual time. We’ve reached pivotal milestones that have further cemented AlphaSense as the preeminent market intelligence and search platform, including our $180 million Series C fundraise, the acquisition of Stream and their leading expert interview transcript library, and the continued rapid expansion of our content and product offering. These accomplishments are just some of the many that show the incredible momentum we are seeing in our business.

Here is a brief summary of our major highlights in 2021:

1. We raised $180 million in our Series C fundraise, led by Viking Global and Goldman Sachs.

In September, we announced our $180M Series C fundraise and welcomed an incredible group of new investors: Viking Global, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Bank of America, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Cowen, and AllianceBernstein.

Many of our new investors are already customers and Wall Street Insights® content providers, which is perhaps the most powerful indicator of the importance of our role in delivering the most valuable premium content to the business world.

With this new investment, we are continuing to strengthen our mission by fueling product development, further expanding our content sets, bolstering our international offering, and delivering best-in-class customer support. More details in this blogpost.

Our funding news was also featured in Forbes and by Nasdaq on a billboard in Times Square in New York City, which I must admit was quite exciting to see.

Nasdaq AlphaSense Billboard 1536x1024 1

2. We acquired Stream by Mosaic, making us the premier source of primary and secondary market intelligence.

In October, we acquired Stream by Mosaic, the market’s broadest and highest-quality expert interview transcript library.

Stream has always closely shared our mission for empowering strategic decision-making through the best insights and best technology. Through this acquisition, our customers can now unlock the ability to better understand the strategy of various players in almost any market, unearth unique competitive insights, and easily access market intelligence that wasn’t accessible this broadly ever before – even with heavy primary research efforts. All this, combined with our Al search technology, allows our clients to extract business-critical insights even faster and more confidently.

We are excited to welcome the truly impressive Stream team as part of AlphaSense. I can’t wait to share more about Stream in 2022 as we continue to scale and invest in this valuable content set.

3. We’re continuing to expand Wall Street Insights® with new partners, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, William Blair, Raymond James, and RBC.

Wall Street Insights® (WSI) is a key feature of our platform, a content offering that allows companies across all industry verticals to tap into the deep expertise of premier equity research from Wall Street’s top analyst teams—including J.P. Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, UBS, Credit Suisse, Bernstein, and William Blair.

We have always been committed to expanding our collection of equity research, and this year, we welcomed J.P. Morgan, William Blair, Raymond James, and RBC. Most notably, in June, we formalized a partnership with Citi, when we became their only provider of aftermarket research to the corporate market. I’m thrilled to say that there is so much more to come in 2022.

4. We now have over 2,000 enterprise customers, which include the majority of the S&P 500.

Our platform wouldn’t be what it is today without our customers that use it and provide feedback every day. We’ve experienced tremendous growth this year and I’m proud to say that our customer base now includes the majority of S&P 500 companies, over 75% of the S&P 100, 70% of the top asset management firms, 76% of the top consultancies, and all of the largest 20 pharmaceutical companies.

The word about our value is spreading within our customers’ organizations as well. User adoption per customer has increased by 20x across our largest customers.

Some powerful examples from our customers include SAP leveraging AlphaSense to validate their research hypotheses, Haskell leveling up their post-pandemic collaboration, and 3M overcoming information overload.

5. We’ve released significant product improvements and innovations to our core technology.

2021 was a busy year for product development: we improved and innovated on our core tech across the board, including building on our AI summarization and monitoring technology, a much-streamlined UI leveraging proprietary AI for an ever more fluid UX – and AI-powered financial modeling, among many other enhancements.

Our team has been hard at work on the next evolution of our product, which will deliver insights more proactively to our users, highlighting new product launches, competitive developments, risks factors, opportunities, macro trends, and much more, before it’s on anyone else’s radar. Some of this breakthrough innovation can already be seen in our latest AI-enabled features launched this year, like Company Topics, Dashboard, and Recommended Reads.

6. We’ve surpassed 500 employees around the world.

This year, we’ve added 200 employees to AlphaSense and are now a company of over 500 employees – and continuing our rapid pace of growth.

Our team was truly put to the test in the 2nd year of a global pandemic, but they continued to exceed all expectations and break records. I am so grateful for the hard work and commitment of my colleagues, especially for their collective support in our vision of empowering professionals to make smarter decisions with confidence and speed. I have so much confidence in our team to make this vision a reality.

If you’re excited about our mission and our future, I’d love for you to join us. We are hiring remotely and in India, Finland, U.S., and the UK.

To everyone, including our team, customers, partners, and investors, thank you for your support in 2021. I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come. Happy Holidays and see you in 2022.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Kokko
Jack Kokko

Jack Kokko is the CEO and founder of AlphaSense, the search engine for market intelligence. His mission is to leverage AI to help businesses acquire information more efficiently, and make better decisions more quickly and confidently.

Read all posts written by Jack Kokko