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November 16, 2023

^Me every week publishing this newsletter.

This week 4 acquisitions, 5 fundraising rounds, 3 people moves & promotions, 1 article, 1 role, 1 exciting rebrand and product launch, and 1 special event announcement.

M&A

*transactions have been announced but may not be closed

Fundraising

  • BlastPoint (consumer analytics) raised $8M in a Seed round led by Curql.

  • Canopy (data composability) raised $4M in a Seed round.

  • Fyma (occupancy and mobility analytics) raised $2.1M in a round led by Quadri Ventures.

  • Transcend (financing and collateral workflow) raised an investment from Citi.

  • VaultSpeed (data automation and transformation) raised €15.1M in a Series A led by Octopus Ventures.

Ascential Digital Commerce has integrated 11 businesses serving consumer brands, plus its alternative data team, into a new single brand, Flywheel.

As a result, Ascential Alternative Data has become Flywheel Alternative Data, taking with it the eCommerce pricing dataset that investment managers have used extensively for the last five years. This flagship data product is now known as eCommerce Insights and has several significant new enhancements available from this week:

  • Retrospective ticker mapping has doubled to 390 public companies alongside a substantial number of private comps from the 100k brands tracked.

  • New data points in the datafeed product include ratings and reviews now collected for 150+ retailers

  • Upgrades to the Exabel platform for visualising eCommerce Insights include a new Evergreen Product vs. Seasonal Product analysis capability for product counts, average prices, discount factor and sell through.

  • New quant white paper using this dataset standalone has an annualized return of 10.1% and a 1.66 Sharpe Ratio over the 8 year strategy, of which the recent 3 years are at 1.77, 3.42 and 1.79.

  • New Arb Insights collaboration using Flywheel's Pricing and Markdown data in a comprehensive Gross Margin Model, including COGS (Commodity Prices, Wages, Freight) and Transaction Data. This margin model is now in production and available for a demo from Arb. Flywheel's data points are consistently among the most additive to the model across many tickers.

To Learn More

Flywheel Alternative Data has launched a new linkedin page that you can follow to access new research and use case examples that are being released regularly, so be sure to follow them here. The team is scheduled to attend the upcoming BattleFin Miami and Eagle Alpha New York conferences.

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

Who’s Hiring

The full agenda for Neudata's Winter Data Summit 2023 has just been published. The event features speakers from data and solutions providers, and leading asset managers including:

  • Jason Koulouras, Bridgewater Associates

  • Mark Fleming-Williams, Capital Fund Management

  • Mike Chen, Robeco

  • Stewart Stimson, Jump Trading

  • Adam Nahari, Pinegrove Capital Partners

  • Ryan McCormack, Invesco

  • Stephen Cash, Seven Eight Capital

  • Evan Reich, Verition

Session themes include:

  • Macro Trends

  • Quant Strategies

  • AI in Alternative Data

  • Alternative Data Trends

The day will wrap up with a Shark Tank-style competition featuring Yellow Submarine, Caden, ProntoNLP and Tiki Data.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you can request one of a limited number of complimentary tickets for investment-side attendees.

What I’m reading

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

And another for good laughs…

Views here are my own and not of my current or former employers.