Conducting Private Market Research with Expert Insights

Staying ahead of the curve in private market investments requires access to reliable and comprehensive private market research and company data. Unlike public markets, where information is readily available, private markets often lack transparency, making it challenging for investors to access reliable data. 

Private markets play a critical role in the global economy, offering immense growth opportunities for venture capital, private equity, and other investors. Understanding trends in these markets is essential, but traditional research methods often fail to capture hidden opportunities or emerging risks.

Experiential insights from industry experts and expert networks have emerged as a powerful tool to navigate this complexity by providing first-hand knowledge that can cut through ambiguity in private markets.

AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence platform designed to help investors make faster, more confident investment decisions and accelerate private market research with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) search technology and premium research data. As of July 2024, AlphaSense and Tegus have joined forces, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights, covering more industries and companies than ever before.

Below, we explore how AlphaSense’s expert calls can provide a competitive advantage in the private equity investment landscape.

The Importance of Expert Calls in Private Market Research

Private market research refers to the analysis and assessment of non-publicly traded assets, such as private companies, venture capital, private equity, and other alternative investments. Unlike public markets, private market research relies heavily on alternative sources and specialized knowledge from experts to uncover deeper insights. 

Expert insights, gathered from those with real-world experience in specific industries, fill this gap by providing timely, in-depth perspectives that can reveal both opportunities and risks that might otherwise go unnoticed. Expert calls are one-on-one interactions that offer investors a unique opportunity to interact with experts who possess in-depth knowledge of specific industries or emerging trends.

Where traditional research methods may fall short, expert calls provide access to first-hand, up-to-date information that can be invaluable in making informed investment decisions. A fully realized investment strategy incorporates expert calls to unlock granular insights to enhance research and maximize return on investment.

How to Conduct Private Market Research with Expert Insights

Below are four ways to use AlphaSense’s Expert Insights to elevate your private market research.

1. Assess the Competitive Landscape

When formulating investment theses, assessing the competitive landscape of any opportunity is imperative to identify growth potential and mitigate any industry-specific risks.

For example, let’s take a private equity (PE) firm that is considering an investment in a privately held technology startup in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Even if the firm has conducted preliminary research into the company, it still needs deeper insights to fully understand the competitive landscape of the market.

Initially, the PE firm can schedule an expert call with a veteran technology executive who has extensive experience in the AI industry. The expert will then provide critical insights into the current market dynamics, competition, threats, and potential opportunities. These expert insights give the PE team a comprehensive view of the startup’s landscape and help them assess its competitive position in the overall market.

One excellent resource for expert insights is AlphaSense’s library of over 140,000 expert transcripts and expert call services. By connecting with industry specialists through AlphaSense’s expert calls, investors and businesses can understand the nuances and complexities of an industry more deeply.

2. Understand Growth Potential

After assessing the competitive landscape, the PE team must understand the opportunity’s growth potential. One significant advantage of leveraging expert calls is the ability to uncover niche market knowledge and identify emerging trends early on that might be overlooked by traditional research methodologies. 

The same PE team mentioned above would need to consult with a leading AI researcher who can provide insights into the latest trends and technological developments in the AI field. The researcher would then share their perspective on the startup’s product, its potential for growth, and areas where the startup could innovate to stay ahead of the competition.

Take this excerpt from an expert call transcript with a former engineer at NVIDIA who was previously responsible for developing deep learning libraries for NVIDIA hardware across the globe for example:

“If I am working at a start-up company right now and my manager asks me to run this or develop this deep learning application, I will buy NVIDIA’s device right now because I am more confident it will work out of the box with less amount of work for me.

“What will change my perspective is that definitely, if for example, OpenAI says we are running this application on AMD devices, it will change my attitude as well. I will download AMD’s software stack by their devices and if there is a bug I am encountering other posts online and somebody will fix it and the whole development acceleration is faster as more people get to try their devices and their software tools.”

– Expert Transcript | Engineer, NVIDIA (Prior)

3. Identify Industry-Specific Risks

Furthermore, experts can offer PE researchers alternative perspectives that may challenge existing viewpoints, help mitigate potential risks, and identify potential red flags to make well-informed decisions.

By leveraging Expert Call Services from AlphaSense, PE researchers can access specialized legal experts to identify potential red flags and develop risk-mitigation strategies to make well-informed decisions.

After a PE firm understands the growth potential of the technology startup, the PE firm should then consult a legal expert specialized in technology and Intellectual Property (IP) law. The expert can offer insights into potential legal challenges and regulatory changes that may impact the startup’s operations and growth. These insights help the team evaluate potential risks and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Investors could be at high risk when exploring investments in startups without an IP counsel. For example, one expert call transcript with a former IP attorney at Dennemeyer suggests that many startups struggle to find attorneys and forgo keeping an in-house IP counsel as AI technology improves.

“I think legal departments are getting smaller and GCs are having to take on more responsibility. Where a company that I worked with for many years, I would say almost all of them have a reduced number of GCs that they keep on staff. Very, very few companies, unless they have significant IP assets and they’re in a research development-heavy type of field, very few are keeping in-house IP counsel. That’s a little bit of a change, I would say.

I would say, though, that this is also due to the fact that these softwares and AI in the IP industry is getting better. I think that IP attorneys are more inclined to use technology as opposed to other types of attorneys, because many of us have a science background, so we’re more tech-inclined to things like that, so we’re maybe using software.”

– Expert Transcript | IP Attorney, Dennemeyer (Prior) 

Therefore, leveraging expert transcript libraries and expert call services from AlphaSense can allow researchers to extract vital insights from IP attorneys without forgoing the consultation process entirely.

4. Validate Investment Theses

Investment theses often rely on assumptions and projections, especially in private markets where comprehensive data is scarce. Engaging with industry experts through AlphaSense’s expert calls and expert transcript library allows investors to validate their investment theses and receive critical feedback on their assumptions with alternative perspectives.

The PE firm can validate or adjust its investment thesis using all the expert insights gathered. For example, if the experts’ insights align with the team’s initial positive assessment of the startup, the firm could proceed with the investment. Conversely, if the experts raise significant concerns that the team hadn’t considered, they might reevaluate their decision.

After using Expert Insights to validate their theses, researchers can gain the competitive edge necessary to move strategically and outperform competitors in the private market landscape.

AlphaSense and Tegus: Streamlining Private Market Research

Researching private companies is typically challenging due to the lack of publicly available data, rapid industry shifts, and opaque markets that make it difficult for investors and analysts to stay accurately informed.

The combination of AlphaSense and Tegus provides investment researchers with extensive libraries of high-quality research data and powerful AI search tools that allow users to extract the most value from their insights rapidly. 

AlphaSense

AlphaSense now offers expanded coverage of private companies by integrating Tegus transcripts within its expert transcript library. This combination positions AlphaSense as a comprehensive solution for private market research. 

Unlike other research tools, AlphaSense incorporates smart search capabilities within its platform, empowering users to find everything needed for their research without manually toggling between multiple tabs.

AlphaSense streamlines the research process with powerful AI features:

• Smart Synonyms™ – An AI search feature that can recognize both the keywords and search intent behind a query to eliminate noise from your search and pinpoint the exact information you are looking for.
• Sentiment Analysis – AlphaSense uses NLP in its sentiment analysis technology to identify differences in a text’s tone and subjective meaning. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.
• Smart Summaries – Glean instant earnings insights and reduce time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.

Tegus

For investors who spend too much time manually searching, parsing, and aggregating data from disparate sources, the Tegus platform reinvents the investment research process so you can compete on your unique ability to analyze data correctly and make great investment decisions.

Unlike legacy research methods, the Tegus platform gives investors:

The fastest way to learn about public and private companies – Whether getting up to speed or performing due diligence, investors need to quickly understand a company’s business model, drivers, and much more. Tegus helps this process get done in minutes instead of days.

The most critical content and data on a single platform – The only solution with expert research, robust qualitative content sets, and key financial data in one place. Don’t settle for siloed systems and fractured data sets that slow you down.

A single software license to drive value and consolidate research costs – Tegus provides simple platform pricing so you don’t get nickel and dimed for high-value datasets or powerful workflows. It’s all included.

Unlock the Power of Expert Insights for Private Market Research

As the private market investment landscape continues to evolve, leveraging AlphaSense’s expert transcript library and expert call services for private market research is imperative to building and executing a successful investment strategy and enhancing decision-making.

With Tegus integrated into the AlphaSense platform, we are able to provide deeper insights, faster research, and access to a larger network of experts than ever before. 

Ready to elevate your private market research? Start your free trial of AlphaSense today.