BST Awards 2025: Best private markets data provider—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

S&P Capital IQ Pro for Private Markets delivers market and reference data on over 55 million private companies, integrating firmographics, headcount analytics and industry insights. The platform enables users to pinpoint companies with more than 20% headcount growth, those hiring FAANG/MANGO engineers or expanding sales teams internationally, unlocking new opportunities and actionable trends through advanced analytics and deep expertise.

The solution  

While there are many pureplay private markets data providers, the ability to link multiple datasets enhances the value of the underlying data to investors. For example, identifying a list of non-sponsor-backed companies that also have a growing engineering team needs to be precise and transparent. S&P Global’s emphasis on quality datasets ensures results are accurate and reliable. As buy-side firms look to ingest third-party datasets, S&P Global’s Linking service helps to alleviate implementation burdens.

Secret sauce  

• Private company data expansion, adding more than 1 million companies in requested regions of the world to push closer to comprehensive global coverage
• Addition of headcount analytics, covering growth and churn by department and hiring trends among competitors, integrated with the breadth of S&P Capital IQ Pro data
• Expansion of director and officer information, completing origination workflows and key stakeholder analysis

Recent milestones

• Continued expansion of workforce analytics on a company level
• Expansion of workforce analytics to professionals, looking at relationships, pedigree and track record
• Sourcing of new “last mile” data that is only available through expert networks

Why they won

This is the first time this category has been on offer in the Buy-Side Technology Awards lineup, reflecting the importance of private markets data to a variety of buy-side firms through increased levels of transparency, enhanced valuations and due diligence in what has traditionally been a stubbornly opaque market. Reliable private markets data supports enhanced risk management functions, portfolio construction and decision-making across the private equity, venture and alternative assets segments.

S&P Global’s win in this category comes on the back of its IQ Pro for Private Markets offering, designed specifically to help investors access and analyze private company intelligence. By integrating over 55 million private company profiles with detailed headcount analytics, industry insights and relationship data, the service delivers transparency and accuracy, helping buy-side personnel make the most judicious and rigorous investment decisions. 

Its ability to connect diverse datasets, including workforce expansion, hiring trends and ownership details, allows investors to identify emerging growth opportunities and conduct precise due diligence. The addition of global coverage, director and officer data, and “last mile” insights—the most detailed, difficult to access and high-value private markets information—sourced through expert networks has helped significantly enriched origination workflows, while the firm’s Linking service helps simplify data ingestion for its buy-side users.