Intelligent private company data, supporting the M&A target sourcing process

An effective deal sourcing process has become more important than ever when trying to find attractive investment targets within the private company arena in the DACH region and all over Europe. Strategy, Private Equity and M&A have become increasingly data-driven and structured in the deal sourcing process.

Being the market leader in Nordic private company intelligence, Valu8 Company Intelligence has been expanding within the DACH region since 2019, disrupting the existing company data solutions with a combination of structured and unstructured company data for company sourcing.

Our deal sourcing platform covers detailed data of more than 70 million European private companies, helping our clients to quickly access relevant information, ranging from industry analysis down to company details, financial data, group structures, ownership data, key people and peoples’ networks.

Valu8 sees the M&A driven, private company data landscape, simplified, as a pyramid. In Germany, as for most European countries, statutory reported structured data can be retrieved at Bundesanzeiger and other public registries. Statutory structured data forms the base with tens of millions of companies, effectively all registered legal entities within a region.

New technology, using machine learning and NLP (natural language processing), enables truly value-added enrichment of traditional, structured data with additional layers of normally web based, unstructured data, creating completely new ways of mapping pan-European company data. Examples of this are similarity scoring algorithms, cluster key influencers with a sector or a company sphere and blended key indicators to determine where a private company is heading on a growth line.

Enhanced data and technology for entire sectors and for millions of companies in a region, provide remarkable results. This second layer of enriched datasets becomes even more important for private companies where the availability of public statutory data is lower and public reporting is lagging in some markets by up to 24 months.

Higher in the pyramid, both technology-driven solutions as well as data analysts are used to quality check large amounts of data. For selected, value-add “edge” data for Private Equity and M&A users, we build semi-manual datasets again using both technology-driven solutions as well as data analysts. Examples are detailed ownership data and private equity focused data such as private equity portfolio company data and portfolio peer company data.

At the top of the pyramid, our platform value ends, as we see it – at this point the highly focused data analysis is rather naturally made by the Private Equity or M&A professional. To date, there is no sharper alternative than the human professional’s qualitative analysis of a condensed data set in the form of a provided short list of target companies or individuals. Our mission is, ultimately, to make sure our customers do not miss out on any potential companies or targets in the screening process due to bad data and to increase the efficiency in the sourcing process.

With close to 400 organisations using our European platform we, offer a personalised product that meets the specific needs of each user and can be customised for different industries or segments.

With backgrounds from the M&A industry, our team aims to have a pro-active approach with our users, using our customers’ feedback to constantly improve our product offer over time.

Anders Lundgren, Founder and CEO: “We see M&A driven data in the form of a pyramid. We add private company data intelligence and target sourcing efficiency in the first 80% of the sourcing selection process, where we make sure that the entire selection is represented, and no potential companies or targets are missed in the screening process due to bad data. The last 20% of more qualitative analysis is made by our customers.”

Find out more at www.valu8group.com