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AlphaSense, an AI-based market intel firm, snaps up $150M at a $2.5B valuation

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12 months ago

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Market intelligence — where organizations gather information about industries, other businesses, trends and more in order to use that data to help make business decisions — has become a huge industry in itself over the last few decades, projected to be worth nearly $84 billion in revenues this year. Now, as newer innovations like ChatGPT threaten to cannibalize the market, one of the bigger startups in the space, AlphaSense, is announcing a significant fundraise of $150 million to double down on the opportunity for growth.

The Series E round — which bumps New York-based AlphaSense’s valuation up to $2.5 billion — is being led by Bond, with participation also from CapitalG (Alphabet’s fund focused on larger investments), Viking Global Investors, Goldman Sachs and new backer BAM Elevate.

These are both financial and strategic investors: AlphaSense has more than 4,000 enterprise customers — covering “the majority of the S&P 500, the world’s largest banks, investment firms, and consultancies, and leading companies spanning every sector of the economy” — and more specifically the list includes search engine behemoths Google and Microsoft, J.P. Morgan and BAM Elevate.

That list of customers, and the basic numbers of this latest round, are both impressive considering the state of play right now, when even startups with promising technology are finding it hard to close rounds, stand up strong valuations and win business.

But AlphaSense’s own activity speaks to the ups and downs in the current market. This is a definite up-round — in the last 15 months prior to today, the company collectively raised $325 million in its Series D (first $225 million led by Goldman Sachs and Viking Global and then a $100 million extension led by CapitalG), ending with a $1.8 billion valuation.

On the other hand, AlphaSense was originally looking to announce this very round, at this very amount, back in June, before delaying for three months (during which time some details of the round leaked out anyway). We’ve asked the company why it held off.

There are a number of ways for organizations to identify and gather market intelligence these days, including the use of in-house research teams, enterprise search and business intelligence tools like LexisNexis or Elastic, outside consultancies, and much more.

AlphaSense’s spin and unique selling point is that it positions itself as a platform that is part data crawler, part insights extractor.

Today the company covers some 10,000 sources of information that span private and public content published by big and small research firms, government and other public bodies, and competitors and other businesses. One particular area of focus has been honing in on financial insights, which AlphaSense beefed up with at least two acquisitions: Stream, which transcribes and catalogues “expert” interviews (executives, competitors, and supply chain members of top companies asked in-depth questions about an industry by analysts); and Sentieo, a financial intelligence platform that targets investment managers.

Its platform — sold as a service (“insights-as-a-service” is actually a thing) — can be used to gather information about a specific company, but in the process of doing that, AlphaSense has built machine learning and its own natural language processing technology to “read” that data and make it into a digestible narrative and series of graphics of their own.

“We focus on the search for unstructured information, and we provide structure to it,” is how Jack Kokko, the founder and CEO of the company, described the process to me last year. Web search intelligence is a problem that is constantly being fed through machine learning algorithms. The more people search on Google, the better Google gets, he said. “But our system has to understand language and land on the right information without the benefit and insights of billions of web searches. None of that exists for private information.”

That is also, it seems, what will help AlphaSense continue to differentiate itself — at least for now — and outperform against the threat of generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has, unsurprisingly, already been weaponized (or celebrated?) as a market research engine.

Speaking to me in connection with this latest round, I asked about the impact of ChatGPT, which has really seen a surge of interest in the last year. It gives “somewhat random results that don’t understand the business or commercial standpoint” of the researcher asking questions of it, he said. “We are training our own Large Language Models, and we are seeing better performance that way.”

However, he’s canny enough to know that this, longer term, will only be a part of what makes AlphaSense useful to its customers. “We can’t predict that will be the case 12 months from now. We need to be on top of many things at once,” he added.

That’s something that AlphaSense may well be using its own engine to track for itself, and if it’s as effective as its investors and customers bet it is, that will keep it one step ahead of the rest.

“At Bond, we look for iconic technology companies that are shaping the future,” said Jay Simons, general partner at Bond, in a statement. “With the ability to deliver the right insights and data to help businesses confidently make the everyday, strategic decisions that ultimately define their future, AlphaSense immediately struck us as a category creator emerging into one of those iconic companies that significantly advances how the business world works.”



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SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Crew Returns After Historic Mission; ISS Astronaut Captures Epic Picture

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4 hours ago

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September 17, 2024

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The five-day Polaris Dawn mission concluded on September 15 and all four astronauts have returned safely to Earth. At 1:08 pm IST yesterday, SpaceX confirmed that the Dragon spacecraft made a successful splashdown off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean.

What followed was happy visuals of the astronauts greeting the recovery crew as they stepped out of the spacecraft.

“Welcome back to Earth!” posted SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on X.

The crew included Shift4 payments system founder and billionaire – Jared Isaacman, retired US Navy pilot – Scott Poteet, Senior Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX – Sarah Gillis and Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX – Anna Menon.

They spent five days in space after the launch on September 10 and reached the highest Earth orbit since the Apollo missions.

ALSO SEE: SpaceX Shares First Views Of Earth As Polaris Dawn Reaches Highest Orbit In 50 Years

Astronaut photographs Dragon’s stunning return

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, from the International Space Station (ISS), captured the Dragon spacecraft on his camera as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown.

“Polaris Dawn entry this morning. I photographed it at 7:23 am GMT from the Cupola on ISS. In addition to the multi-colored entry trail over Florida, the basic cone shape of the Dragon capsule can be seen,” Pettit captioned his post.

Pettit arrived at the station with Russian cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin with Ivan Vagner on September 12. The trio launched to space from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Polaris Dawn concludes

The Polaris Dawn mission was the first of three in the Polaris Program. The entire program is being financed by Isaacman and intends to demonstrate new technologies, support development toward exploration of the Moon and Mars while supporting the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

In Polaris Dawn, the astronauts conducted 36 science experiments to gauge changes in the human body in outer space and performed world’s first spacewalk on a private mission. The objective of the spacewalk was to test mobility of SpaceX’s new suits.

The second mission, timeline of which will be announced soon, will build upon the success of Polaris Dawn.

Interestingly, the third mission will be a crewed flight on the world’s biggest rocket – Starship, that SpaceX is building for its missions to the Moon and Mars.

ALSO SEE: SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Astronauts Complete Historic First Private Spacewalk; Videos Released

(Image: X/@DonPettit/@SpaceX)





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NASA rover peers up at space, sees strange Mars moon and distant Earth

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9 hours ago

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September 17, 2024

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Robotic Martians can see blue Earth in Mars‘ sky.

The Curiosity rover, a car-sized NASA robot looking to find evidence of past habitability on the Red Planet, recently snapped an image of Mars’ misshapen moon, Phobos, and Earth next to each other.

“It’s the first time an image of the two celestial bodies have been captured together from the surface of Mars,” the space agency explained.

SEE ALSO:

NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills.

In the photo below, you can spot a ridge of Mars’ Mount Sharp at the bottom of the image. The upper right contains both Phobos — a moon 17 miles long — and Earth, which from some 200 million miles away appears as a bright speck of bluish light. (The second image is a blown-up view of the two objects.)


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“From the rover’s perspective, the inset area would be about half the width of a thumb held at arm’s length,” NASA explained.

The moon Phobos and Earth seen in the upper right.

The moon Phobos and Earth seen in the upper right.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A zoomed-in view of Phobos, on left, and Earth.

A zoomed-in view of Phobos, on left, and Earth.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

The Curiosity rover captured this image on Sept. 9, 2024, during its 4,295th Martian day (called a “sol”) on Mars. It’s been rumbling over Martian terrain for over 12 years, and is currently ascending the 3.4-mile (5.5-kilometer) high Mount Sharp, a place that once experienced dramatic Martian floods.

Compared to our moon, which appears almost perfectly round, Phobos is misshapen. It’s not massive enough for its gravity to form a sphere. What’s more, Phobos has been hit time and time again by potent space rocks. “Phobos was nearly shattered by a giant impact, and has gouges from thousands of meteorite impacts,” NASA noted. The glaring impact site is Stickney crater, which is 5.6 miles (nine kilometers) wide.

As Curiosity continues its long slog up Mount Sharp, its robotic sibling, the Perseverance rover, is sleuthing the irradiated Martian surface for past evidence of microbial life. This means “chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago,” the agency said.

Still today, no evidence of life has been found on Mars — though NASA has spotted some compelling geologic leads. It’s clear, however, that the now-desert planet once teemed with lakes and rivers, back when it was a warmer, more hospitable, world.





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Sunita Williams Embraces Her Unexpected ISS Extension; ‘This Is My Happy Place’

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14 hours ago

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September 17, 2024

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Astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore joined NASA for a press conference on September 13 with updates about their stay in space. While addressing the world from the International Space Station (ISS), the duo acknowledged the situation they are in but said they are not disappointed.

Williams and Wilmore launched to the ISS on June 5 for an 8-day mission but the faults within their ride Starliner has forced them to stay longer. They were part of Boeing’s Crew Flight Test (CFT), the company’s debut mission with astronauts. Starliner returned empty on September 7 as it was too dangerous for the crew.

Meanwhile, the duo will continue living and working aboard the station and is now scheduled to return no earlier than February 2025.

ALSO SEE: Sunita Williams Is Exposed To Radiation Levels Equivalent To Getting Hundreds Of X-Rays; What Are The Risks?

‘This is my happy place’: Sunita Williams

Despite the disheartening scene of Starliner leaving without them, Williams wan’t discouraged and has described space as her “happy place.”

“This is my happy place. I love being up here in space,” she said at the press call.

Sunita Williams with Barry Wilmore aboard the space station. Image: NASA

Both astronauts stressed that they are not disappointed with their extended stay and that issues were expected since the CFT was a test flight. Wilmore also said that they had to make some decisions on a timeline as the unforeseen situation emerged.

“The timeline came to the point where we had to decide, is Starliner coming back with us or without us? And we just did not have enough time to get to the end of that runway where we could say that we were going to come back with it. I think we’d have gotten there, but we just ran out of time,” Wilmore said.

Since Starliner is no longer an option, NASA has planned to rescue the duo on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. It is launching two astronauts on the Crew-9 mission on September 25 who will return with Williams and Wilmore six months later.

“We’re excited to fly in two different spacecraft. I mean, we’re testers; that’s what we do,” said Williams about riding Dragon on her way back home.

ALSO SEE: NASA Reveals Astronauts For Crew-9 Mission To Rescue Sunita Williams

(Image: NASA)





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