New York — FirstRain is a company that helps institutional investors to search the “deep web”. In an era when web searches are dominated by a single firm, whose methodology delivers exceedingly homogenous results, it is always encouraging to see that some are trying to mine the web in new and innovative ways. This recent press release announced FirstRain’s growing base of institutional clients:
SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 8 /PRNewswire/ — FirstRain(R), the leading
provider of search-driven research, today announced the signing of its
100th institutional client. This is an important milestone and marks an
acceleration in the number of firms and subscribers since the company
launched its new search-driven research platform two years ago.[…]
“This is the year smart financial professionals incorporate the web
into their standard research process. Adding thousands of subscribers and
now our 100th client is validation of the imperative the market feels to
use the breadth and depth of information the Web offers — and that a new
level of technology can make this systematic and repeatable,” said Penny
Herscher, President and CEO of FirstRain. “The web has grown into the
richest but most chaotic business dataset in the world. At FirstRain we
have developed a product that not only maps vastly dispersed web data into
our user’s world view of companies, management, industries, business topics
and competitors, but also derives powerful analytics from the data. As a
result our users can quickly identify data points, trends and questions
from across the Web that impact their business decisions.”FirstRain users, who are typically corporate executives in marketing,
sales and finance, or institutional buy-side portfolio managers and
analysts, describe the value they receive from FirstRain as:— Highly efficient and personalized access to hard-to-reach
information from sources like blogs, international and local news and
industry publications— Revealing and unique analytics about Management, including
unannounced turnover and communication patterns— Comprehensive visibility into data on hard-to-research mid-cap,
small-cap and private companies— Risk mitigation by systematically ensuring no web information
relevant to the company is missed each day— Daily reports of critical information about industries, corporate
governance issues and competitive trends retrieved from widely dispersed
data sources on the WebFirstRain customers are worldwide and include:
— Investment managers and mutual funds
— Large and small hedge funds
— Corporations in technology, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy and
others segments
— Private equity firms
— Funds of funds
— Pension funds
— Information platforms as distributors of FirstRain results.