Best research sites, databanks for privately held companies in the US - free & w fees

What are the best (most valid, comprehensive) databanks and research sites for privately held companies in the US like Hoovers, Privco..etc?!

29 Comments
 

I'm in venture capital and definitely PrivCo. But totally free there are others probably but they are wikis, and suspect (I have to admit we VCs have an agenda, and have erased losing embarrassing investments from these wikis, while adding ourselves to winners even if we put in nominal amount or a partner did we will change to firm's name). So a wiki like CrunchB is I guess you get what you pay for. For truly verified fact checked I'd go with former. Depends on time you have to spend (my time is very valuable) and budget (I can afford to pay for the Rolex of private company financials and deals research).

 

Sorry for slow response, I check in from time to time. But to answer your Q:

From my personal and our VC firm's experience using both PrivCo and CapIQ and comparing both when we knew the private company's financials (i.e., our VC firm's portfolio companies), PrivCo was consistently accurate on the financials, CapIQ was consistently wrong and data was so flawed as you said (or in several cases did not even have any financial info just name, or several didn't even have the company at all). The sample size was maybe 3 dozen of our portfolio companies, but that was enough of a test drive for our firm stopped using CapIQ and our firm now solely uses PrivCo and we're much happier with it.

Every use-case is different of course.

Hope that helps.

Jim

 

Hi, I was just providing my opinion on this in this thread, I will just copy my answer from there:

Depends on your budget for this, of course :)

There are definitely databases, what comes to mind first is products of Bureau van Dijk (AMADEUS database for European companies, ORBIS database for worldwide, etc.) I must mention that (1) access might be pretty costly, and (2) lag between the moments when financials are submitted by the company and when they are added to database might be up to year, so it does not serve as access to fresh information but gives great retrospective overview.

 

First of all, you're not going to be able to find the financials of private firms. Second of all, "private market trends" is too vague for me to give an answer. If you were interested in a certain sector, then maybe I could help you out more. At any rate, I'd suggest you go to the companies website, determine what sector they are in, see who the management is, and what awards they have won, if any. Next I would see if they have received any funding (CrunchBase.com is usually a good starting point).

 

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