Rock Paper Scissors

Since last post we’ve seen 4 mergers & acquisitions, 5 funding rounds ($19.3M raised), 11 people moves & promotions, 1 new product, 11 roles, 2 articles, and 1 newly added upcoming event.

Resources

• Deal Tracker - updated with YTD investors and acquirers

• Job Board - 57 open roles with an average $237K salary

• Compensation Study - added in data tab where you can see anonymized rows. Participate to receive the results link. If you already participated and can’t find the results link, respond to this email or email [email protected] and I’ll send it over (please don’t take the survey again)

M&A

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

• Aonic acquired Prime Insights (market research panels). PR

• MariaDB acquired SkySQL (serverless database-as-a-service). PR

• OpenAI acquired Statsig (data-driven product development). PR 

• UserEvidence acquired Zealot (customer advocacy). PR

*Deals are announced but may not be closed.

Funding

• Artificial Societies (AI personas for market research) raised $5.3M in a Seed round led by Point72 Ventures.

• Bench IQ (AI-powered court intelligence platform) raised $5.3M in a Seed round led by Battery Ventures and Inovia Capital.

• CustomerInsights.ai (life sciences commercial analytics) received an investment from Cypress Growth Capital.

• Genow (knowledge AI) raised €1.65M in a Seed round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds.

• UserEvidence (customer evidence) raised $7M.

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

• Ahmed Abbas was promoted to Director of Product, Core at NewtonX.

• Justin Arnold joined Dunnhumby as Data Strategy and Commercialization Director.

• Marc Brookman joined Convergency Partners as a Partner.

• James Cole joined YUKKA as Sales Director.

• Tom Gavin joined FundApps as Chairman.

• Todd Hartmann joined LSEG as Global Head of Data and Feeds.

• Erik McBain joined HedgeID as CEO.

• Tamar Rapaport-Dagim joined the Board of Directors of Similarweb.

• Derek Scheer joined Samsung Ads as Senior Manager, Business Development - Data & Measurement.

• Dmitry Shevelenko joined the Board of Directors of Lazard.

• David Solganik joined Raymond James as Head of AI Strategy.

• Stephen Tulenko joined Dun & Bradstreet as CEO.

New Product Launch

We launched Vendorgraphics at AggKnowledge! More info on the launch can be found here.

Who’s Hiring

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

• BlackRock is hiring a Head of AI and Data Transformation, Americas Client Business ($215K - $275K).

• Bridgewater is hiring a Data Ranger Associate ($105K - $175K).

• Burtch Works has been retained by a PE firm for a Head of Data Strategy & Enablement ($250K - $325K).

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is hiring a VP, Scientific Data Strategy ($363K - $519K).

• Franklin Templeton is hiring a VP, Head of FIRST Technology Platform ($250K - $300K).

• Kadoa is hiring a Web Scraping Engineer.

• Macrobond is hiring a Enterprise Account Manager.

• Millennium is hiring a Content Analyst, Fixed Income & Commodities, Data Sourcing & Strategy.

• Oaktree is hiring a SVP, Head of AI ($200K - $225K).

• Orchestra is hiring a Strategy & Operations Lead.

• Verition Fund Management is hiring a Real Time Market Data Strategy Lead ($175K - $200K).

*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

• Smarter Surveys, Faster: How AI is Transforming Survey Design by Ashley Shedlock at Greenbook.

• Modern, Driver-Based KPI Modeling, a white paper from Exabel.

• Hedge Funds’ New Secret Weapon: How Alternative Data Companies Are Changing Investing by David Wignall in Barron’s.

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

• Insights Association Corporate Researchers Conference, Sep 9-11, Chicago

• Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Sep 17, NYC

• Neudata Traditional and Market Data Summit, Sep 18, London

• Data Management Summit, Sep 18, NYC

• *Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan 2025 Future of Finance & Ai Conference, Sep 19, NYC

• Market Research Society B2B Research Conference, Sep 24, London

• Big Data LDN, Sep 24-25, London

• The 21st Quantitative Finance Conference, Sep 24-26, Palermo, Italy

• Web Data Extract Summit, Sep 24-25, Austin, TX

• ESOMAR Congress, Sep 28-Oct 1, Prague

• BattleFin Discovery Day, Oct 9, NYC

• Women in Research (WIRe) Executive Leadership Summit, Oct 20-23, Dubrovnik, Croatia.

• Stocktwits Stocktoberfest, Oct 20-22, Coronado, CA.

• The Private Markets AI Summit, Oct 28, NYC

• World of DaaS Summit, May 7, 2026, Washington D.C.

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