Waters Rankings 2017: Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology Provider—AlphaSense

AlphaSense offers a financial search engine that helps analysts and portfolio managers to find information that’s buried in dense text documents, from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings (including footnotes) to broker research reports, pieces of news and conference transcripts. 

One of the key aspects of AlphaSense’s offering—which the San Francisco-based firm describes as “the Google for company research”—is its ability to take a sea of data and narrow it down to specifically what users are looking for, and also alert them to key words that they might not have considered. The vendor has its own financial-world-specific dictionary and thesaurus to help direct portfolio managers and traders toward information that they might have otherwise missed. One portfolio manager told Waters that the platform has cut his search times down on an individual company from four or five hours to 30 or 45 minutes. According to the vendor, two-thirds of the top 50 largest equity-focused hedge funds in the world use AlphaSense’s platform. 

In March this year, AlphaSense announced that it had raised $33 million in funding, which includes new investors in the form of Tribeca Venture Partners, Triangle Peak Partners and Quantum Strategic Partners, as well as individual investors, including former Thomson Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer, who had previously acted as an advisor to the vendor prior to his investing.

In the wake of its fundraising, AlphaSense made a number of key hires. First, to expand its content library, it added Bob Magri as the firm’s chief content officer. It also hired Kevin Broom to serve as executive vice president of product development in order to drive updates across the platform. “We’ve also made significant increases to our sales team to build into new verticals, including corporate intelligence,” notes a spokesperson. Using the funding, AlphaSense will continue to look to build out its platform, including the additions of new languages.

Earlier this year, AlphaSense won the best analytics product at the Sell-Side Technology Awards, and took home the same award in 2015 at the Buy-Side Technology Awards.