Executive Summary
Recent market conditions, including increasing interest rates, seem to have impacted private markets as badly as public markets. After encountering a steady 12% growth between 2017 and 2021, private markets lost over 20% in fundraising in 2022. However, investor interest in private markets, and more particularly in private equity, is still alive and the assets under management (AuM) of private equity funds have so far resisted.
Investing in privately held companies comes with a number of challenges, one being access to quality data. Due to an inherently high level of confidentiality and low disclosure requirements, private equity is a space where detailed and reliable information is hard to find. However, access to data is arguably even more crucial in private markets than in public markets.
Opimas has identified about 20 leading vendors – including PitchBook, Preqin, and S&P Global, among others – providing data solutions for private equity. Offerings include different datasets such as private company data, fund data, investor data, and benchmarks.
Based on providers’ actual and estimated revenues, Opimas believes that the market for private equity data exceeded US$1.2 billion in 2022 and could approach US$2 billion by 2024. This projected growth will be supported by a regulatory push in the US and in Europe, which will vastly improve data availability and quality.