AlphaSense Inc., the developer of a market intelligence platform popular among investors and large enterprises, has secured $100 million in fresh funding.

Announced today, the round was led by Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG startup fund. Goldman Sachs and Viking Global Investors participated as well. The funding extends a $225 million Series D investment that AlphaSense first announced last year.

The New York-based startup, which is now valued at $1.8 billion, will use the capital to grow its sales team. It also intends to explore potential acquisitions as well as build more features for its namesake market intelligence platform.

AlphaSense’s platform enables financial professionals to quickly find information about companies in which they’re considering to invest. The platform aggregates data from equity research notes, regulatory filings, newspapers and other sources. Users can browse financial data through a search bar that takes natural language queries as input.

Besides company data, AlphaSense can also provide market-level information. It enables financial professionals to track key developments in a given sector and study long-term trends. Users can, for example, find information about an important research discovery or impending regulatory changes in a given segment.

The platform is used by not only investors but also enterprises. According to the startup, a company can leverage its platform to track competitor activity. Its search engine also lends itself to other tasks, such as finding potential acquisition targets.

The startup’s customer base includes 85% of the companies in the S&P 500 stock market index. According to AlphaSense, three quarters of the world’s top investment firms are clients as well. Overall, AlphaSense has more than 4,000 customers worldwide.

“Every company’s enterprise value is a cumulative sum of the decisions they make – and our mission is to improve strategic decision-making for businesses worldwide,” said founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Kokko. “This financing and partnership will help accelerate that even further.”

The startup told CNBC that its annual recurring revenue exceeds $100 million. Additionally, AlphaSense disclosed that it eventually plans to go public.

In the more immediate future, the startup intends to upgrade its platform with generative artificial intelligence features. The plan is to launch an AI tool that will summarize financial data to ease analysis for users. According to AlphaSense, the tool will include auditing features for ensuring that automated summaries are accurate. 

CapitalG’s investment in AlphaSense comes as parent company Alphabet is also increasing its focus on generative AI models. In February, it debuted a generative AI chatbot called Bard. Last week, Alphabet and Google LLC Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai detailed that the company plans to add similar chatbot to for its search engine.Image: AlphaSense