PitchBook Data Inc. said Tuesday at Web Summit in Lisbon that it is making its private markets platform free to qualifying startups and launching a separate deal sourcing service called Origin. The Seattle company, which Morningstar Inc. has owned since 2016, said the free access is aimed at founders preparing to raise a first institutional round. Origin is offered as a standalone product or as an add-on to the main PitchBook platform.
The free tier, called PitchBook for Startups, is open to founders who have bootstrapped their companies or raised only from angels, grants or accelerators. Applicants must be seeking a first institutional round and must be able to show at least a mockup of their product. PitchBook said founders who share financials and details about their leadership team and product can then use the platform to research which firms are actively writing checks in their sector and at their stage, which the company said tops its own list of uses for the access.
Data contributed by those founders feeds into Origin, whose coverage begins at roughly 25 million companies and 250 million people profiles. The count includes bootstrapped businesses and companies that have not raised money or disclosed what they are building, and about 15 million of the companies are new to PitchBook. The coverage draws partly on third-party data enrichment and PitchBook's own machine learning models. PitchBook said it has not previously had founder-verified data at scale.
Origin assigns each company a score, and investors can adjust relevance filters to match their own criteria. Real-time alerts, saved searches and integrations with customer relationship management systems are intended to replace the manual monitoring that deal teams currently perform. Chief Solutions Officer Paul Santarelli said investors have lacked visibility into the stage before a company raises, when the most important signals are hardest to observe, and that each company joining the startup program and contributing verified information improves that view.
The launches arrive as more startups secure first rounds. PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association found in their latest Venture Monitor report that the 2021 record for first-time financings in the U.S. had already been broken by the end of September. PitchBook attributes part of that growth to artificial intelligence, which it says has made companies easier to start and has shortened investor diligence from weeks to days. Sourcing has not kept up, the company argues, especially where the signals are not public.
PitchBook was itself a startup once, working to get in front of the right backers, President and Chief Operating Officer Rod Diefendorf said. The company was founded in 2007 and now serves more than 100,000 clients worldwide. Startups can apply for the program now.
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