New York—Gridstone Research, a San Mateo based provider of data and quantitative tools, raised $10 million in a Series B round to support expansion and marketing of its product that gathers and delivers detailed data and guidance on public companies.
Gridstone was founded in August 2005 by veterans of Indian outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies Ltd. The goal was to create tools targeted to US investors, and clients include hedge funds including Maverick Capital as well as long-only investors such as AllianceBernstein LP, and Oppenheimer Funds Inc. Maverick was sufficiently impressed with Gridstone to be an early round investor in the company, and participated in the latest financing.
While information services such as Bloomberg LP and Thomson Reuters offer financial information available in public filings, Gridstone’s proprietary software was developed to extract detailed financial and operational data from all company sources, including earnings call transcripts, and to identify key text references from company guidance.
The system mines unstructured company documents for operational information, such as numbers of units sold of particular products; it also conducts detailed cost analysis to help financial analysts spot trends in strengths and weaknesses.
Content is made available through a browser-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, which allows users to organize, compare, chart, manipulate, download, search and audit it. Any number represented in the data can be clicked on to bring up management commentary surrounding that parameter. Numbers can also be clicked on to show the source document from which it was taken.
The latest funding round was led by Helion Venture Partners of Bangalore, India, along with other previous investors Charles River Ventures of Boston and Maverick Capital Ltd. of San Francisco (the private equity group within Maverick), and brings total investment in the three-year-old company to more than $18 million.
The full article can be found in http://www.thedeal.com/techconfidential/vc-ratings/news/gridstone-raises-10m-for-provi.php.