The Sunday Edition
Invest in Vests
ICYMI
We had some M&A from PE and Advisory businesses, with Levine Leichtman Capital Partners acquiring expert witness company Expert Institute and SLR acquiring ESG Advisory firm Malk Partners.
$96.1M raised across 11 funding announcements, with a theme around document parsing and data extraction with AgileDD (document extraction) receiving an investment from Qlarant Capital, Reducto (document parsing for LLMs) raising $8.4M in a Seed round led by First Round Capital, and Briink (AI-powered ESG data extraction) raising €3.85M in a Seed round led by EquityPitcher Ventures and 13books Capital.
Two new company alerts, Pricing Culture and Thread AI.
13 people moves and promotions, including multiple c-suite promotions: Mark Cunningham promoted to CEO at Kpler, Jason Richman promoted to CEO at SafeGraph, and AungMaw Lin promoted to COO at BCA Research.
4 interesting roles across 3 companies, including Anthropic hiring a Data Science and Analytics, Go to Market and Hyatt hiring a Director, Data Science - Decision Science.
About Last Night (Week)
Caught up with Bryant Lewis and Scoop (pictured) at Felix Roasting in West Soho to chat all things data and AI and hear more about Thread AI (this past week’s new company alert).
On Tuesday it was over to the Penn Club for Market Data vs Alternative Data Convergence: Best Practices Workshop for Sourcing and Managing Vendors, hosted by Archedata. There was a great discussion amongst top data buyers from hedge funds and an awesome demo of the Archedata platform. If you’re a data buyer or managing multiple vendors, you’ve gotta check this out! DM me for a warm intro.
Wednesday headed down to Nashville. No, I did not go on the Talk Tuah podcast, but I was thoroughly entertained by the two people who thought that was serious and asked me about how it was. I went for the Teamworthy Ventures Founder Forum. I’m doing a writeup of some of the panel discussions and product demos, but two highlights to share now are dinner on Thursday and a captivating discussion with health-tech and defense-tech experts Jonathan Yantis (CEO of QuicksortRx), Kevin Rogers (Managing Partner at Cyber Advisory Partners), Stephen Britt (Data Privacy & AI Lawyer), Tim Katsapis (Defense-tech Expert), and Brian Cashin (VP at Teamworthy Ventures).
The other highlight was Brian jumping in with the band and absolutely crushing it on the fiddle…
Shoutout to Poindexter Coffee for being an awesome place to get some work done. I wasn’t aware this was such a photo hotspot. Apparently being a LinkedInfluencer with a data newsletter did not qualify me for VIP status and I’m not quite sure the 22 year olds taking hundreds of pics knew what LinkedIn was.
The Week Ahead
Laying low - bunch of meetings during the day but no formal evening plans this week.
