Asymmetrix Data & Analytics M&A and Fundraising Deal Analysis - October 4-10, 2024
TL;DR - M&A for Netsmart; fundraising for Noetica AI, Signals, Quartr, ID.me; an IPO for Springer Nature.
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October 10 - Noetica AI, a NYC-based provider of an AI-powered software platform for benchmarking deal terms, raised $22m in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Bling Capital, Flybridge Capital, Company Ventures, and TheLegalTech Fund.
Noetica claims to “leverage the industry's largest knowledge graph of corporate debt, securities, and M&A transaction terms to make data-driven decisions in complex deals.”
This seemingly innocuous fundraising caught Asymmetrix’s attention for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the company appears to straddle two important Data & Analytics sub-sectors: Legal Data & Analytics and Financial Data & Analytics. Our experience shows that covering more than one sub-sector is a great growth driver, particularly if one of those sectors is Financial Data & Analytics.
Secondly, unique and transactable corporate debt datasets are highly valuable. Noetica appears to be creating such a dataset.
[Noetica co-founder] Daniel Wertman’s time at BlackRock Inc. prior to graduating from Harvard Law School and then at Wachtell helped him realize that technology could help law firms, lenders, banks, and investment managers in the corporate debt market, he said.
He said he was sitting at his desk at Wachtell one day and asked a senior lawyer how to access a market database to check if a borrower of a certain type could get specific terms. The answer? It didn’t exist.
Founded in 2022, Noetica had previously raised $6m in seed funding from Lightspeed in December 2023, and a $1.2m pre-seed led by Bling Capital in 2022.
October 10 - Academic publishing trust provider Signals completes funding round.
An early stage investment here but worth taking note of due to the heavyweight individuals involved, including Andrew Preston of Publons (sold to Clarivate) and now Cassyni, and serial investor Sven Fund.
The academic publishing industry has been impacted by scandals around paper mills, with Wiley particularly hard hit due to irregularities in their acquired Hindawi unit.
Signals aims to help publishers to “navigate the complexity of research integrity, implement the right solutions to meet their strategic objectives, and monitor their performance. At the core of this approach is the Signals Data Graph, which delivers rapid evaluations of articles at every stage of the publishing process by uncovering insights within complex networks, including citation patterns and co-authorships.”
October 9 - Public markets Data & Analytics provider Quartr secures €5.4m from Altos Ventures.
Quartr provides access to public markets investor relations content, including quarterly earnings calls and investor presentations, and analytics tools to help investors to retrieve relevant information.
Its products include Quartr Pro, a desktop research platform used by hedge funds, asset managers, equity research departments and IR professionals; and a free mobile app and an API solution, enabling third parties to build custom solutions based on its data, which includes live earnings calls and other IR data.
According to the announcement, “Quartr provides over 18 million end users around the world with easy access to first-party information from over 10,000 public companies.”
Quartr had previously raised $7.1m in seed funding in July 2022 from investors including The Öhman Group, Flat Capital (the investment firm of Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski) and Centripetal Capital.
Quartr are not alone in providing this service - to some extent they are competing with giants like Factset and Bloomberg, as well as newcomers like AlphaSights. And there are no shortage of start-ups providing similar services. Yet they seem to be getting traction, presumably driven by a combination of functionality, data quality and price. One to watch.
October 9 - ID.me to let shareholders sell at $1.8bn valuation - Bloomberg.
Backed by Alphabet’s CapitalG, Viking Global and FTV among others, ID.me provides identity proofing, authentication, and group affiliation verification in the US for organizations across sectors, including commercial, healthcare, and government services.
Ribbit Capital, Viking Global and CapitalG are participating in the deal, the people said. Viking, CapitalG and ID.me declined to comment. Ribbit did not immediately comment.
The investors are offering $67m to purchase shares from existing shareholders, one of the people said. The offer was launched on Friday and is expected to close on Nov. 1. The company itself is not selling shares.
Since its founding in 2010 ID.me has grown to nearly 1,000 employees.
This news is interesting for a number of reasons:
Provides a valuation benchmark for the business: $1.8bn (up from $1.73bn in the 2022 funding round);
Provides a revenue number for 2023: $130m;
Mentions the possibility of an IPO in 2025 - although the fact that this transaction is taking place at all suggests that the IPO may actually be further away.
October 4 - Springer Nature's shares leap on Frankfurt debut - Reuters.
Although we analysed this impending listing at the beginning of September, we failed to comment on the launch itself last week.
At the end of the first day of trading Springer Nature, which sold €600mn of shares as part of the deal, was valued at €4.8bn.
Although primarily an Academic publishing business, Springer Nature does have a small Data & Analytics component.
For more info on the business, read our analysis here:
FT subscribers should also check out the Lex analysis of the business.
October 4 — Netsmart announced it has acquired HealthPivots, an Oregon-based market intelligence company for post-acute care.
In all the excitement about Surescripts and the electronic health record sector last week, we failed to report this transaction.
According to the press release:
The combination of the Netsmart CareFabric with the HealthPivots DataLab will lead to consolidated, robust data and advanced analytics, providing an industry-leading platform that will help enhance post-acute care providers transition to value-based care.
Netsmart was rumoured back in January to be exploring a sale:
The private equity owners of Netsmart Technologies are exploring a sale of the U.S. healthcare software firm that they hope will value it at more than $5 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Overland Park, Kansas-based company, which is owned by GI Partners and TA Associates, is working with investment banks Goldman Sachs Group and William Blair to launch a sale process in the coming weeks, the sources said.
It is unclear what the status of the ongoing process is. But adding HealthPivots is likely to make Netsmart more attractive to any potential acquirer.
This certainly corroborates last week’s Asymmetrix thesis that Surescripts is likely to acquire Data & Analytics businesses post-investment by TPG. Auction processes for Healthcare Data & Analytics providers are likely to see healthy levels of competitive tension in the years to come.