AlphaSense is a US market-intelligence and search company founded in 2011 by Jaakko "Jack" Kokko, who conceived it after experiencing the tedium of manual document search as an investment-banking analyst. Its product applies natural-language and generative search across a licensed content estate — equity and broker research, company filings, event transcripts, expert-call transcripts, news, trade journals — alongside a customer's own internal research (Source: research.contrary.com; alpha-sense.com).
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founder and CEO | Jaakko ("Jack") Kokko |
| Headquarters | United States |
| Acquisitions | Sentieo (2022), Tegus (2024, $930M), Carousel (2025) |
Snapshot
Valuation
| Date | Value | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06 | $7.5B ($350M round) | (Source: theinformation.com) | |
| 2024-06 | $4B | Reached alongside a $650M round co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners, at the time of the Tegus acquisition | (Source: research.contrary.com) |
Revenue (ARR)
| Date | ARR | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07 | >$700M | Reported alongside IPO preparations | (Source: theinformation.com) |
History and growth by acquisition
The company launched its first product in 2011 as the Information Discovery Engine, aimed at portfolio managers and investment analysts, after roughly three years validating the idea and building the technology. It initially served financial-services customers only, on the reasoning that the data-gathering problem there was well defined (Source: research.contrary.com).
Three acquisitions widened both the content estate and the customer base beyond investment firms: Sentieo in 2022; Tegus, an expert network and financial-intelligence platform, for $930 million in June 2024, at which point Tegus had passed $100 million in ARR and served more than 3,000 businesses; and Carousel in 2025 (Source: research.contrary.com). The Tegus deal was accompanied by a $650 million round co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners, with JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Blue Owl, Alkeon, Alphabet's CapitalG and Goldman Sachs Alternatives participating, taking the valuation to $4 billion.
IPO preparations
AlphaSense's IPO preparations became public on July 23, 2026: the company had topped $700 million in annual recurring revenue and was reported to be working with advisers on a listing in the coming months, weeks after a June 2026 round of $350 million at a $7.5 billion valuation (Source: theinformation.com).
Governance and AI assurance
An AI-vendor directory records an unusually complete disclosure practice for the sector, and its specifics bear on the standards questions the record tracks elsewhere. AlphaSense is described as running a trust centre carrying SOC 2 Type 2 attestation and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification with published bridge letters and a policy library; offering bring-your-own-key and bring-your-own-storage deployment with customer-managed encryption keys; mirroring a customer's existing permissions so the assistant cannot surface content a user is not entitled to see; and stating that its AI is never trained on customer data and that it works only with model providers enforcing zero data retention. The same entry records that the company states plainly it is not currently certified to ISO/IEC 42001 while pursuing it and committing to publish progress (Source: aifintechindex.com).
That last point is the substantive one for the standards record: an AI vendor with mature security certification publicly distinguishing between information-security certification it holds and AI-management-system certification it does not. The source is a vendor directory rather than a first-party disclosure or an accredited registry, so the certification claims are recorded as reported. The same entry gives figures — more than 6,500 organisations served, 88% of the S&P 100, roughly 2,900 employees, and ARR "passed 500 million dollars" — whose ARR figure is lower than the July 2026 reporting above and evidently older; the customer and headcount figures are undated.
Open questions
- The listing venue and timetable are not stated on the sources reviewed here, and no filing is recorded.
- Whether ISO/IEC 42001 certification has since been obtained is not established.
- Terms of the Carousel acquisition are not disclosed.
Relationships
- deploys-in: Financial Services — AI Deployment — AI research tooling for financial and market analysis
- regulated-by: ISO/IEC 42001 — AI Management System — states it is pursuing but does not hold the AI-management-system certification
- related: AI Copyright — the product rests on a licensed content estate rather than on unlicensed training data
- related: Enterprise AI Deployment Gap — permission-mirroring and customer-managed keys as enterprise deployment controls