This Week’s Vendor News

NEW & UPDATED PRODUCTS

Drawbridge clients can now use cybersecurity benchmarks and forecasting capabilities to better meet the needs of investors and allocators. By leveraging cybersecurity data from over 1,000 alternative investment firms, Drawbridge is able to give their clients the ability to better evaluate, prioritize, and improve their cybersecurity posture based on peer comparisons. ↗

Affinity has released new generative AI-powered features that make deal teams more productive with more actionable insights in the CRM, as well as their browsers, emails, and virtual meetings. They have also launched three new product updates including Affinity Industry Insights, Affinity Notetaker and Affinity Deal Assist. ↗

SEI has launched enhanced technology capabilities in its Investor Portal and mobile app. New features include a document vault to seamlessly upload personal documents, secure messaging to facilitate better collaboration, and account aggregation to connect investment, banking, and real estate accounts directly from other financial institutions. ↗

AlphaSense has released its Beta of Smart Summaries for Companies—a tool that helps AlphaSense users find impactful company insights sourced from internal communications, Wall Street analyst reports, and thousands of expert interviews. So, you would leverage Company Smart Summaries to learn the “table of contents” of an organization. ↗

Private Equity Info has released a new feature, LinkedIn URLs. Quickly build lists of relevant firms for your clients and connect with the right private equity executives on LinkedIn with PEI's newest feature. ↗

Atfinity is almost done with version 11.1 and with it will come two new features. One is more document upload options, including if outdated documents are uploaded, users can overwrite this and still accept the document. Also, user will have the option of Splitting Booklet by ontologies. Booklets can already be split by different documents. However, the same document can be required to be filled out by multiple people. This features creates one single booklet to be used by all. ↗

Tactyc has added new features to its platform. First, they have added tracking and reporting on to realized IRR from realized cash flows. Tactyc's IRR performance summary now includes Construction Forecast, Current Forecast, Actual and Realized for Gross IRR and Net LP IRR. They have also added FX Analysis, which summarizes the impact to fair market values from fluctuations in FX rates for foreign currency investments. ↗

Dialllog has revealed a new feature, Data Editing in List View. With this enhancement, you can now effortlessly make modifications in dropdowns, tickboxes, and short text fields directly within the list view, which increases efficiency and productivity. ↗

DEAL ACTIVITY

AlphaSense has announced that its $150 million Series E financing round, led by BOND, and joined by existing investors including Alphabet's CapitalG, Viking Global Investors, and Goldman Sachs, which brings AlphaSense's valuation to $2.5 billion. ↗

Cygnetise has secured £2.5 million in a pre-series A funding round. This will facilitate the acceleration of the collaborative digital signatory management solution’s growth by further expanding the company’s sales and technology teams. The funding will help the startup target further international and sector expansion and service rapidly growing demand. ↗

PARTNERSHIPS & INTEGRATIONS

Vestberry and Affinity have launched their integration together. This partnership will allow venture capital professionals to seamlessly combine their relationship and portfolio intelligence, revealing connections and insights across their entire portfolio. ↗

Bain & Company have announced a new partnership with Shelton AI, a data sciences and AI company. The partnership will enable investors to optimize investment strategies and asset allocation through unmatched private markets data and analytics. ↗

Filament Syfter and SourceScrub have announced a new partnership. Filament Syfter can now integrate SourceScrub's data warehouse and rich data repositories with Filament Syfter's advanced AI analytic capabilities - creating a proprietary solution for your firm that revolutionises how M&A, deal makers, and origination/sourcing teams discover, analyse, and capitalise on investment opportunities. ↗

M Science has announced that its affiliate, Sundial Data, has launched a new dataset, offering a more detailed look into cloud service providers and semiconductor suppliers. M Science has integrated the Sundial Liftr data into its Public Cloud Instance Tracker, Data Center & AI Dashboard, and respective research reports. ↗

Atfinity enhances its security measures by partnering with Aikido. Aikido's platform is designed to streamline the process of identifying vulnerabilities. By reducing false-positives and providing human-readable Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), Aikido ensures that Atfinity's development teams can efficiently address security issues without getting hammered by unnecessary alerts. ↗

Carta has announced a new partnership with Sequoia, an HR company based in California. This new integration centralizes a company’s equity information and Carta Total Compensation benchmarking data within the Sequoia People Platform. Also included is guidance from Sequoia’s Compensation Advisors leveraging real-time Carta data to ensure your compensation strategy is on the right track. ↗

Taipei Exchange (TPEx), FactSet and Entelligent have launched the first three indices within the TPEx FactSet Smart Climate Index Series. The indices are the result of a collaboration whose mission is to empower the growing community of investors who aim to support a sustainable future while maintaining portfolio growth. ↗

Alto has announced a partnership with venture capital firm Kearny Jackson. Kearny Jackson is an early-stage fund founded by Sriram Krishnan and Sunil Chhaya, and is backed by and co-invests alongside high profile institutions and private investors. ↗

Attio has announced a new partnership with June, which is a product analytics tool entirely built for B2B SaaS companies. This integration will allow you to sync your product data into Attio in a few clicks. You'll have a single source of truth combining CRM and product data. No reverse ETLs or data warehouses required. Benefits of this integration will be: upsell power users, prevent churn, and get the right context on every user. ↗

Georgia Tech Foundation has collaborated with Solovis to launch and implement a new risk solution stemming from COVID- 19. Now every week, GTF uses Solovis Risk Analytics to monitor its risk and portfolio exposures. GTF also has weekly conference calls with Solovis’ R&D team (the team that built the Risk Analytics application). ↗

FactSet has announced a strategic partnership with Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets solution. This partnership integrates Irwin’s investor relations CRM with FactSet’s Workstation. This integration provides an end-to-end platform for corporate clients to enhance investor engagement, conduct research, and streamline reporting. ↗

Persefoni has announced a strategic partnership with SupplyShift, a provider of supply chain transparency software and sustainable procurement solutions. This collaboration enables customers of both companies to seamlessly track carbon emissions and subsequent improvements, covering the full spectrum of scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. ↗

Addepar and Venn by Two Sigma have announced they are enhancing their integration. Venn was designed for the allocator market to help analyze multi-asset portfolios of public and private investments of institutions. When combined with Addepar’s aggregated data, investors truly see and analyze all their holdings in one place. ↗

RepRisk has joined the Responsible Investment Association (RIA), Canada’s leader in responsible investment. The RIA and its members strongly believe that responsible investment is a valuable tool to enhance returns, reduce risk, and catalyze positive social change. ↗

Barrow Hanley Global Investors, a global asset management firm, has integrated Assette software to bring a more modern and streamlined approach to how they engage with their clients, which has significantly improved efficiency and productivity for the firm. ↗

Fintel has selected PE Front Office as a technology partner for managing their investment portfolio. This partnership equips the Fintel team to enhance and streamline their alternative investment processes. ↗

HIRING & PERSONNEL

Pitchbook has welcomed Paul Stoddart to the PitchBook team as CMO. Stoddart was most recently at Salesforce where he led the Customer and Partner Success and Services portfolio. ↗

T-REX has announced the appointment of Suraj Nekram as its new CFO. Suraj Nekram was featured as a Top Technology Leader of New Jersey in 2022, according to The Financial Technology Report. ↗

IQ-EQ has moved to a new, larger office in Newcastle City Centre to facilitate future growth for the company. They are also actively recruiting for a number of different roles in the new office. ↗

Ontra has appointed Eric Hawkins as Senior Vice President of Engineering. In this role, Hawkins will lead the technical and security teams responsible for developing Ontra’s Legal Operating System, a suite of AI-enabled solutions that automates legal workflows across fundraising, portfolio investment, and fund operations. ↗

VENDOR WHITEPAPERS

Katipult has released a new Insights report titled, SEC's Overhaul of the $20 Trillion Private Fund Industry: Unpacking the Regulatory Changes. In this report Katipult discuses how these regulatory changes carry far-reaching implications for broker-dealers, private fund managers, and investors. ↗

StepStone has released a new whitepaper called, A systematic approach to private debt allocation in institutional portfolios. This whitepaper was produced in partnership with GIC and aims to provide an overview of private debt investment opportunities and introduce a systematic framework for optimizing private debt allocations in institutional portfolios. ↗

On November 13th 2023, the SEC's amendments to the Investment Advisors Act of 1940 will take effect. To summarize the 600+ page documentation published, Totem VC broke down some key details for registered and unregistered (most VCs) investment advisors. ↗

Preqin has released new Commentary: Understanding rising risk of ESG litigation for private markets. Preqin found that for private markets in particular, the rise in ESG litigation constitutes, both as an engagement tool on one hand and for financial institutions invested in funds, an increasingly material risk as reputational damage and expensive payouts can significantly affect valuations. ↗

ERM has released a new Insights Report called - CFO briefing: Responding to sustainability disclosure requirements. One finding is that CFOs are well placed to contribute to sustainability performance and disclosure in a range of ways including: Sustainability data management, Enterprise risk management, Access to finance and Transition plan development and implementation. ↗

Deloitte has published a new report called, Private company outlook: Raising capital. Deloitte asked 100 private company C-suite executives about their outlook and strategies for navigating financial risks and opportunities. ↗

Drawbridge has released a new report called: Don’t make these cybersecurity mistakes in your next ODD review. Drawbridge believes that valuations of your cybersecurity program should be an ongoing activity to help prove to your board that you are taking incremental progress in protecting your firm and investments. ↗

Cambridge Associates has published: Six Things to Know About Co-investments. They found that investor interest in co-investing has grown in recent years, given the benefits for both GPs and LPs. The co-investment universe has grown rapidly, with Cambridge Associates estimating total private equity co-investment activity in 2022 to have been ~$50 billion. ↗

Cyndx has released: A Guide to Finding Financial Information on Private Companies. One finding is that private companies are not subject to the same regulatory requirements of public companies, there exists neither the necessity nor the motivation to disclose their financial reports. This differs from publicly traded companies, which are mandated to release their financial statements periodically for public consumption. ↗

DealsPlus has published: Tracing beneficial ownership in private equity investment structures. In this blog, DealsPlus gives 3 main reasons why tracing the economic ownership in private equity investment structures is challenging. ↗

Ontra has published: Entity management 101 for private fund professionals. This blog offers an explanation of entity management within private funds, current practices, and the advantages of adopting a modern entity management solution. ↗

Grata has released a new blog: Is your BD team playing the long game? One key finding is that when BD teams think about deal flow it’s usually through two channels: 1) Proprietary sourcing to extend your firm’s network and get in front of targets directly and 2) Fielding inbound banked deals. But Grata believes that relationships with financial advisors and other investors can go overlooked. ↗

Alkymi has released: A high-performance approach to personalizing an LLM. If you want to take advantage of generative AI in your workflows, Alkymi can offer a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG is a method where you provide the LLM with relevant information it can use to find the answer to a question, at the moment the user asks the question. Using semantic search and vector databases, the Alkymi platform can quickly identify this type of relevant information from a document or dataset and surface it to the model. Your questions are then augmented with your domain-specific information, without requiring fine-tuning the model itself. ↗

SimCorp has published: AI Beyond the Hype Machine. SimCorp believes that generative AI can give you a competitive edge in the market. But you need to know how to use it. There is a right way to utilize the technology – and a wrong. That can be the difference between outperforming the market or making an ill-advised decision. ↗

CEPRES has released: Deep Tech in Private Equity - A Snapshot of Different Economic Cycles. CEPRES Market Intelligence explored deep tech deals, their performance distribution and their business model breakdown. CEPRES analyzed a sample of more than 430 historical deep tech deals and benchmarked them against the broader general tech sector. ↗

Alto has published, What to Consider when Investing in Venture Capital. It goes over investment horizon, portfolio approach and due diligence. ↗

Axial has released the 2023 Axial Advisor 100. This report helps to identify, verify, and publicly acknowledge the most referred lower middle market sell-side M&A advisors. ↗

IQ-EQ has released a new whitepaper called: Single family offices: the past, present and future. They found that single family offices have grown exponentially over the past decade and this trend will only continue as we are in the midst of one of the greatest generational wealth transfers. ↗

Everstell has published: Driving AUM Growth and Profitability through Dynamic Budgeting and Forecasting Models. Everstell found that employing software to synchronize profitability comparatives, organizations can promptly make course corrections, establish more pragmatic financial targets, and establish a robust framework for evaluating overall firm performance. This strategic use of technology ensures timely decision-making, enhances financial accuracy, and provides a solid foundation for evaluating the organization’s financial performance. ↗

Titanbay has released: Is this the return of the IPO? Titanbay found that inflation is normalising, the rate-hiking cycle is ending soon, recession fears might be fading and valuations on public markets appear to be stabilising. Those factors along with recent events indicate that the IPO window could be opening once again. ↗

AWARDS

We have three vendors from our Vendor Profiles that won awards at the A-Team Group's Data Management Insight USA 2023 Awards. Factset has been named Best Data Provider to the Buy-Side and Arcesium won the Most Innovative North American Data Management Provider award. And Canoe Intelligence has won Best Proposition for AI, Machine Learning. For the last two years, A-Team Group has honored solution providers that provide data management solutions and services to the capital markets. ↗

Decimal Point Analytics has announced that it has received the Intel Oracle Global Leaders Award for ISV of the Year in the APAC region for 2023. This award recognizes Decimal Point Analytics for its exceptional contributions in leveraging Oracle cloud technologies to drive innovation and deliver solutions to clients across the globe. ↗

Datasite has been recognized as a great place to work with three awards, including a bronze in the computer software category in the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Great Employers and by Newsweek as one of "America’s Greatest Workplaces" and one of "America’s Greatest Workplaces for Parents and Families". ↗

Worldfavor has been named one of the 10 Swedish companies on the rise in 2023 by LinkedIn. To compile the list, they looked at LinkedIn data across four pillars: employee growth; jobseeker interest; member engagement with the company and its employees; and how well these startups pulled talent from LinkedIn's Top Companies list. ↗

LinkedIn has revealed the top 20 emerging companies according to LinkedIn. These are the companies rising to the challenges of the moment and continuing to innovate and attract top talent in 2023. Some of our vendors have made this list including, Titanbay (12th place) & Robin AI (13th place). ↗