Canoe Intelligence sits at the center of developments in the way that alternative investments data is collected, processed and reported for wealth managers and other players.

Bloomberg, Canoe
Bloomberg, the business and financial information group, has concluded its purchase of Canoe Intelligence, an AI-powered data management and intelligence platform for automating private markets data. The deal was initially announced at the end of July.

The transaction “marks the next step in Bloomberg's strategy to transform how institutional investors engage with private markets – accelerating Bloomberg's ability to deliver unified data, analytics, and tools to power end-to-end workflows across public and private markets,” the media, business information and market data provider said.

The two firms had partnered earlier this year to bring some of Canoe’s data onto Bloomberg’s platform. Bloomberg has not disclosed the price publicly; a media report earlier this year said that Canoe was valued at 20 times current revenue, giving the deal a value of between $750 million and $1 billion.

The center of gravity has swung in favor 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 digitalized relatively slowly. Canoe has been one of a cluster of businesses seeking to bridge the information gap.