Alternative data: 360° view on companies and professionals
Alternative data, also known as external data, is information collected from non-traditional sources, generated either by individuals, business processes, or sensors. In finance, alternative data is leveraged by businesses and investors to extract valuable insights, generate business opportunities and guide investment decisions.
Coresignal's alternative data
Below you will find our full data offering consisting of a total of 20 unique alternative data sources in 8 categories.
Community and repository data
Access public data about software projects, experienced developers and data analysts.
Discover noteworthy software projects
Source talented professionals
Use it for social listening
Company employee review data
Leverage public data from company review sites to gain internal insights on how a company is doing.
Gain unique insights on companies
Identify underlying risks and problems
Capture changes in sentiment over time
Company funding data
Make better investment decisions based on accurate company funding data.
Generate business opportunities
Screen investment candidates
Understand market landscape
Firmographic data
Get firmographics of millions of companies worldwide, grouped by unique identifiers.
See the full company picture
Map company locations
Dig deep into company structures
Job postings data
Track the growth of selected companies and their teams, identify locations to which a company is planning to expand to and more
Generate business opportunities
Capture company traction
Gain strategic competitive insights
Public resume data
Utilize public member data from business-related platforms to generate unique people intelligence insights.
Track talent movement for investment opportunities
Source best-fit talent for your recruitment needs
Fuel your lead generation pipeline
Tech product review data
Product review data uncovers market sentiment for specific products or companies by various slices.
Measure product traction
Identify market winning conditions
Technographic data
Technographic data provides overview on the technological stack of the company, as well as detailed information on specific technologies.
Generate business opportunities
Evaluate technological capacity
Measure traction
Alternative data for investors
Alternative data enables extracting up-to-date and accurate insights, allowing hedge funds and investment firms to survey potential startups, track company or product popularity, their growth rates, and more, ultimately leading to a better-informed investment process.
Alternative data for businesses
Our data sets provide B2B and B2C companies with up-to-date market knowledge and always fresh business-related people intelligence. From researching market trends to generating leads or unlocking the power of data-driven recruitment, alternative data is becoming increasingly indispensable for the modern business.
What is alternative data?
Alternative data is data generated either by individuals, business processes, or sensors that are collected from non-traditional sources. For example, traditional data is exclusive to data that’s produced by companies themselves, while alternative data relies on the collection and scraping processes. Specifically, traditional data can include investor presentations, SEC filings, financial statements, and press releases. In contrast, alternative data includes company size, location, website traffic, reviews, etc.
Alternative data is acquired through web-scraping, acquisition of raw data, and third-party licensing. Web-scraping processes unstructured data from web pages and online sources. The data is transformed into structured and readable CSV and JSON formats ready for interpretation by analysts and investors through data parsing methods. Raw data acquisition is the process of obtaining sizable amounts of unprocessed data obtained from multiple source types. Third-party licensing refers mainly to recovered financial data involved in transactions, such as POS data and credit card transactions.
There are various ways businesses and investors can leverage alternative data. For instance, within investing, the professionals that utilize alternative data the most are algorithmic traders, also known as quants, who use the datasets they acquire to construct computer models for trade. However, alternative data is also utilized by hedge funds, analysts, and other institutional investment professionals.
Alternative data covers a broad range of factors that influence a company’s alpha, making alternative data sets a commodity for predicative investing. Specifically, investors consider factors such as scarcity, granularity, history, structure, and coverage when choosing what types of alternative data sets to invest in.
Additionally, businesses can utilize alternative data to help fuel and build AI-based technologies, generate more business opportunities, conduct competitive analysis, and enrich their existing datasets. More specifically, HR tech companies, lead generation platforms, B2B, and B2C companies are all able to extract valuable insights from alternative data. For a more in-depth explanation of alternative data be sure to check out our alternative data article.
Use cases for alternative data
Although alternative data, in general, might be used creatively in a near-infinite amount of cases, the data offered by Coresignal is mostly used for the practices listed below.
Investment intelligence
Combine public data with traditional data sets for enhanced investment analysis. Alternative data, combined with the power of AI/ML, enables investors to generate trade signals, identify risks and make better predictions.
Data-driven recruitment
Data-driven recruitment takes the hiring process to a new level. By leveraging data when analyzing talent and prospects, recruiters can make efficient and data-driven decisions.
Lead generation
With Coresignal’s rich and continuously updated public resume datasets, fuel your lead generation pipeline with data on a wide range of decision makers and stakeholders.
Trend forecasting
Companies can leverage our up-to-date alternative datasets as well as our historical data offering to help identify and evaluate market and industry trends for enhanced decision making.
Why Coresignal?
Continuously updated data
Raw, well structured and ready-to-use
Rich datasets
Multiple data sources
Dedicated account managers
Fast and convenient delivery
Frequently asked questions
How big is the alternative data market?
According to Grand View Research, the size of the alternative data market reached 1.64 billion at the end of 2020 and is expected to reach a market size of USD 17.35 billion by 2027.
How much does alternative data cost?
The price of alternative data varies depending on the user and the use case; however, according to Institutional Investor, alternative data ranges from 25,000 USD all the way up to 500,000 USD. In addition to purchasing third-party alternative data, companies should build an alternative data team responsible for managing and storing the data.
Who uses alternative data?
The most common alternative data users include VCs, hedge funds, private equity firms, corporations, SaaS companies, and analysts.
How is alternative data used?
In finance, alternative data is used to discover valuable business insights and generate business opportunities. More specifically, businesses and investors leverage alternative datasets for predicting buying behavior, conducting market research, boosting lead generation, and fueling data-driven recruitment.
How are hedge funds using alternative data?
With the recent advancements in AI technology hedge funds are primarily utilizing alternative data to enhance their investment intelligence and generate business opportunities.
What is alternative data analytics?
Alternative data analytics is a broader term that encompasses the various alternative data analysis processes utilized by companies and investors.