Canoe Intelligence sits at the centre of developments in the way alternative investments data is collected, processed and reported for wealth managers and other players in what is a growing field.

Bloomberg, the business and financial information group, said yesterday that it has agreed to acquire Canoe Intelligence, an AI-powered data management and intelligence platform for automating private markets data. 

The transaction for an undisclosed amount puts two major themes on wealth managers’ agendas – AI and private markets.

“This is the most significant acquisition in Bloomberg's history since Barclays Risk Analytics and Index Solutions – a clear signal of where private markets data infrastructure is headed,” a spokesperson for Bloomberg said in an emailed statement. 

Bloomberg will give its users data on more than three million private companies, 50,000 private funds and 16,000 private direct loans, alongside analytics, news, research, and enterprise solutions.

The centre of gravity has swung in favour of private markets since the late 1990s, partly as a result of tighter reporting disclosure rules on listed firms, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley rules that came into force during the early Noughties after the Enron scandal, and a decade-plus of ultra-low rates post-2008 that attracted money into non-public firms. 

Non-listed company data, which has tended to be harder for investors to obtain in a timely fashion, has often been paper-based and digitalised relatively slowly. Canoe has been one of a cluster of businesses seeking to bridge the information gap. 

Canoe streamlines post-investment reporting and processes more than 1.5 million documents per month across more than 44,000 funds. It gives structured portfolio-ready insights to more than 500 institutional clients representing more than $11 trillion in assets under service. 

"Alternative investors manage billions in private capital without the visibility and insights that public markets take for granted. We've built Canoe around a fundamental belief: that shouldn't be the case,” Jason Eiswerth, CEO of Canoe Intelligence, said. “When we partnered with Bloomberg earlier this year on our PORT integration, we saw firsthand what becomes possible when Canoe's data automation meets Bloomberg's portfolio infrastructure.”

Canoe was incubated by principals of 10East and 22C Capital; its institutional investors included Blackstone Innovations Investments, Carlyle AlpInvest, Eight Roads, F-Prime, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Hamilton Lane, and Nasdaq Ventures.

Jefferies LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor to Canoe and Cooley LLP served as legal advisor to Canoe. 

In September last year, Canoe Intelligence launched Canoe Labs, an incubator where investment and operations professionals can bring new AI capabilities to life.

As reported in mid-August 2925, Dennis Mangalindan, a former senior figure at SEI Archway for more than 14 years, became senior director of sales at Canoe Intelligence; he leads the institutional and family office teams. In March this year, New York-headquartered Canoe launched Canoe Pro Tech: Asset Data PrimePlus in partnership with Prime Buchholz, an investment advisory and outsourced chief investment officer firm.

This news service has contacted Bloomberg for more commentary about its strategy and may update this article in due course.