Customer 1080

3X cooler than customer 360

Author

Dan Entrup
August 13, 2025

Credit: Seattle Data Guy

Late post this week (and evening). It was my birthday yesterday, so… sorry not sorry.

Since last post we’ve seen 4 acquisitions, 5 funding rounds, 18 people moves & promotions, 1 new firm, 1 new product offering, 1 Glacier legal, risk & compliance commentary, 7 roles, 2 articles, and 2 newly added upcoming events.

Datasite M&A

Yesterday I published a piece highlighting Datasite’s M&A activity and potential future acquisition targets. Thank you for the overwhelmingly positive reception and engagement (12 reposts!). Here is the corresponding LinkedIn (your likes are greatly appreciated as always to spread the word).

For additional reading on M&A in the private markets data segment, check out the piece my friend Jared Bochner guest-authored in Alex Boden’s Asymmetrix Newsletter.

And my favorite comment thread (Nevin, you set me up for this one perfectly)…

M&A

Check out the It’s Pronounced Data Deal Tracker for full M&A and funding rounds.

*Deals are announced but may not be closed.

Funding

  • Alkymi (AI-powered data workflows for financial services) raised a round led by Cornerstone Investment Capital and Canaan Partners.

  • Elion (healthcare technology intelligence) raised $9.3M in a Seed round led by NEA.

  • Endex (AI for Excel) raised $14M in a round led by OpenAI Startup Fund.

  • Protege (data for AI training) raised $25M in a Series A led by Footwork.

  • Tracelight (AI for financial modelling) raised $3.6M in a Seed round led by Chalfen Ventures.

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

Powered by

  • John Aronsohn joined Portrait Analytics as Senior Strategic Partnerships Lead.

  • Sonali Basak joined iCapital as Chief Investment Strategist.

  • Shannon Childs joined Sago Health as President.

  • Madison Clark was promoted to Global Head of Law at GLG.

  • Nick Derewlany joined Trustpilot as Director, Sales - Data Solutions.

  • Kevin Duncan joined Oxford Data Plan as Director, North America.

  • James Hart was promoted to President at YipitData.

  • Thomas Hockswender joined InvestCloud as Global Head of Engineering.

  • Davina Kent joined Newton Research as Global GTM Lead, Brand and Agency Partnerships.

  • Greg Kurzman was promoted to Director, Data Sourcing & Strategy at Balyasny.

  • Jason Leavy was promoted to Director, Global Supply Chain - Data Science, AI/ML, and Advanced Analytics at Henry Schein.

  • Andrew Licini joined NielsenIQ as Sales Director, Financial Services.

  • Traci Mabrey joined GLG as Global Head of Public and Credit.

  • Ricky Odello was promoted to EVP of Sales at Rep Data.

  • Isaac Rogers joined Sago Health as CEO.

  • Dimitry Sapon was promoted to Head of Data Science at iA Global Asset Management.

  • Steven Snell was promoted to EVP, Head of Research at Rep Data.

  • Willis Stephens was promoted to Global Head of New Business, Financial Services at GLG.

I’ve partnered with my friends at Glacier Network to provide some legal, regulatory, risk & compliance commentary and alerts. Below is commentary from Glacier about web scraping in the AI era.

2025 has been an interesting year for scraping defenses, particularly CAPTCHA, as AI bots crawl at higher speeds and volumes to feed popular tools and new browsers. Cloudflare now blocks AI bots from scraping new domains by default (and will allow sites to charge per-crawl fees). Site operators are making bolder moves to prevent and punish web scrapers. X's Terms of Service, for example, may penalize even downstream users of scraped data. Both data collectors and site operators are trying new techniques to control data assets that are well-suited to model training.

Scraping norms seem to have relaxed after the hiQ decision and the more recent Bright Data settlement in the US. Robots.txt is not universally followed. In fact, LLMs.txt files now encourage AI bots to add site content to their models. These changes have been gradual but as they accumulate, firms that set scraping policies and procedures years ago may not be in sync with current market practices - and may even be exposed to more risk than they realize. In one recent test, users on Reddit demonstrated that ChatGPT Agent will actually document that it is not a human, while it "clicks" to verify that it is human and bypass CAPTCHA.

Scraping firms such as Bright Data are promoting a broad concept of public data for widespread use. But companies in regulated industries should reexamine scraping techniques and defenses and consider whether their policies and procedures fit this new market reality.

Please visit our site to learn more about how Glacier reviews AI tools and scraping firms.

New Firm Alert

Situational Awareness is a firm focused on AI-related investments. The firm launched last year and now manages over $1.5B. Situational Awareness is run by Leopold Aschenbrenner (prior OpenAI). Additional coverage and info can be found in the WSJ article here.

New Product Alert

Morning Brew Inc. launched MBI Insights, a research offering that taps into a highly engaged audience of millions of subscribers and readers. The new offering has three main categories of service: Market Research, Customer Research, and The Breakroom. Market and Customer research leverage the entire global database for target segments, while The Breakroom is a separate, double opt-in research panel.

The company is also launching an Insights Library.

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.

What I’m Reading

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

Favor

If you’ve read this far, please click here (testing out some readership analytics).

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