Abracadabra

Amor-oo-na-na, Morta-oo-ga-ga, Abra-oo-na-na

Author

Dan Entrup
March 17, 2025

Since last post we’ve seen 5 acquisitions, 7 funding rounds ($69M raised but only one disclosed an amount. A record 5 strategic & growth rounds), 1 new company, 1 survey, 1 special shout-out, 20 people moves & promotions, 1 partnership announcement, 4 roles ($252K average salary), 2 articles, 1 podcast, 1 regulatory matter, 1 chart, and 3 newly added upcoming events. Final call for the updated market map. Be sure to add your company in the comments here. 118 companies companies have been added in the past week for the 2025 edition.

M&A

*Deals are announced but may not be closed.

Funding

  • Amperon (AI-powered energy forecasting and analytics) received a strategic investment from National Grid Partners.

  • E:cue (embedded AI data analyst) raised a round led by Ardent Venture Partners.

  • EquiLend (securities finance solutions) received a strategic investment from BNY.

  • Lightkeeper (portfolio intelligence and reporting) received a growth investment from PSG.

  • Omni (business intelligence) raised $69M at a $650M valuation in a Series B led by ICONIQ Growth.

  • pgEdge (distributed PostgreSQL) received a strategic investment from Akamai Technologies and Qube Research & Technologies.

  • Rep Data (research fraud prevention) received a growth investment from Mountaingate capital.

New Company Alert

Niantic Spatial is a spin-off of the geospatial AI business of Niantic. You may know Niantic as the developer of Pokemon GO, which Niantic announced is being acquired by Scopely in a $3.5B deal for the games division. Niantic Spatial is developing a Large Geospatial Model to enable people and machines to understand and navigate the physical world. The new company will be led by John Hanke and will be funded with $250M of capital. Read more on the spin-off here.

Survey (Last Call)

My friends at PostSig have launched a survey on data acquisition and management. If you have a few minutes, please contribute here. Contributors will get access to the results when the study is complete.

Special Shout-out

This week’s special shout-out goes to Jason Saltzman. Jason and I met within a month of him joining Live Data Technologies and partnered on the people moves section below. During his time at LDT, he went from the occasional post on LinkedIn to being a trusted data and insights provider to major media publications including The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. He launched the Human Capitalist newsletter, growing to over 24,000 subscribers. It has one of my favorite sections, Corrected Headlines (example below). Outside of work, Jason is a professional cyclist (like Tour De France level bada$$) whose idea of a relaxing weekend is a 100-mile ride.

Jason joined CB Insights last week as Head of Insights. Congrats to Jason and the CB Insights team. Excited for what you’re going to built and I look forward to continuing to partner.

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

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  • Alex Albracht joined Unique as Director of Data Science.

  • Raquel Alves was promoted to Global Head of Enterprise Shared Solutions at Bloomberg.

  • Geetika Bhargava joined Enquire AI as Director of Expert Recruitment.

  • Cole Bowser joined Walleye Capital as Data Scientist.

  • Anders Brejner joined Triple Private Equity as Director, Investments.

  • Alex Creed joined Human8 as Head of Business Development, US & Global Practice Lead.

  • Tony Dahlager was promoted to Chief Data Officer at Analytics8.

  • Michael Gannon joined Snowflake as Chief Revenue Officer.

  • Maximilian Gartner joined Brightwave as Director of Sales.

  • Emma Griffin joined AlphaSense as Senior Director of Product, Enterprise Intelligence.

  • Alex Hamilton joined Live Data Technologies as Insights Lead.

  • Isami Ito joined Theia Insights as Chief Commercial Officer.

  • Stephen Lynch was promoted to GM & EVP, Enterprise at AlphaSense.

  • Mano Mannoochahr joined Verizon as Chief Data, Analytics and AI Officer.

  • Jackson Peddy joined Automated Data Inc. as Director of Business Development.

  • Jason Saltzman joined CB Insights as Head of Insights.

  • Dean Schaffer joined Lightkeeper as CEO.

  • Jonathan Tovar joined ISI Markets as Global Business Director.

  • Steve Ward joined Suzy as VP, Field Operations.

  • Tracy Wolfe joined Fitch Solutions as MD, Head of Strategic Pricing and Packaging.

Partnership Corner

  • AlphaSense and Cerebras announced a partnership to revolutionize how enterprises access, analyze, and act on critical market data. As part of the partnership, AlphaSense has integrated Cerebras Inference, leveraging Cerebras' WSE-3 (Wafer-Scale Engine) and Llama models to optimize multi-turn AI-driven financial analysis. As a result, AlphaSense users can perform sophisticated multi-turn queries – delivering results in seconds, a fraction over previous speeds. More on the partnership can be found in the press release here.

Special Job Opportunity

Scott Stephenson is looking for a Co-Founder for a new venture in agentic AI, creating contextualized agents. If you don’t know Scott, he is the prior Chairman & CEO of Verisk Analytics. Check out the post here for more details and reach out to Scott if interested.

Who’s Hiring

Check out the It’s Pronounced Data job board for full listings. This week’s additions are below.

*salaries only listed where provided by the company and may vary based on location and other factors. See links for specific salary details.

For Those Between Jobs

Last week I posted on LinkedIn about the trend of companies providing access to research, data solutions, and services to clients in between jobs. See list below and if you’re on the move, be sure to contact your prior account manager or rep about continuing access while you’re recruiting. Special shoutout to Bloomberg which started doing this years ago and Thomas Li at Daloopa who is the first person I saw post about this in recent months.

  • Aiera

  • AlphaSense

  • Cognitive Credit

  • Enterprise Technology Research (ETR)

  • FactSet

  • FinChat

  • Guidepoint

  • Kpler

  • Octus

  • Politico

  • Quartr

  • RepVue

  • Revelio Labs

  • Smartkarma

  • Spark Commodities

  • Tellimer

What I’m Reading

What I’m Listening To

Chart Of The Week

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

Views here are the author’s own and not of any employers or companies. The author may be compensated for pieces in this newsletter.