Mumbai-HQed Synaptic, which has built an alternative data platform for investors to gain insights on public and private companies, has raised $20Mn in a Series B round. The Series B round was led by Valor Equity Partners. Previously, the company has raised $6mn in seed and Series A funding from Ribbit Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Vy Capital Management.
Founded in 2016 and initially incubated within global PE firm Vy Capital, the platform is aiming to position itself as an alternative source of data on companies, as against what is currently available in the market. While there are platforms such as Tracxn, Crunchbase among others, Synaptic claims to be providing a more productive data platform, with a no-code base. The platform also delivers insights through machine learning, to help users (primarily investors) make better decisions.
While most platforms help investors primarily with financial numbers, Synaptic also leverages diverse alternative datasets in sourcing and tracking companies of interest, market research, and portfolio monitoring. These include “over 100” performance metrics like web and mobile traffic, SEO data, employee data, product reviews, developer activity, search trends, etc, on hundreds of thousands of public and private companies globally. These are layered with machine learning-powered analytics and an automated insights engine, allowing investors to get personalized insights from their data that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
The platform, it says, was born out of “Vy team’s frustration with existing tools and processes” and was hence spun out in 2016 as a standalone company.
Rohit Razdan, Co-Founder, Synaptic, says, “This is a significant step forward to harness the full potential of merging ML and analytics with alternative data to improve investing decisions. We will continue extending and strengthening access to our solutions for decision-makers and alternative data providers. Research and data is a $100bn+ industry that has just begun using alternative data. We want to be the partner of choice for any organization that wants to leverage alternative datasets.”
While numbers on platform’s traction and current reach weren’t available, it does count the likes of General Catalyst, GIC, Ribbit Capital, Felicis Ventures among others as its clients. Most of those however, are a part of current investor group of Synaptic, and it will be interesting to see how the product is received upon a larger roll-out.
The data startup will continue to invest in product innovations, double down on its data science capabilities, partnerships with data vendors, and expand its go-to-market teams in key global financial hubs.
