Hunting for Data on Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Other Alternative Investments

A huge database that aggregates and distributes original data on funds and investment companies specialized in "alternative investments", i.e. investing in unlisted companies and illiquid assets (private equity & venture capital, real estate, hedge funds, investment in infrastructure and renewable energy). The name of the database is Alidat and was built by Fabio Zocchi, who started working on it when he was preparing his thesis for the Bocconi MSc in Finance in 2011. "It was a thesis on private equity funds," says Fabio, "and thehardest part was the dearth of available data. I set to work and came up with an early, rudimentary version of Alidat."

Fabio's work got a boost when he met Andrea Ardemani, who would become his partner in the company, thanks to his advanced IT skills. "In 2015, we began working on a demo and in 2016 we started the company." A year afterwards, Alidat is an emerging and in some ways unique reality in the financial landscape. "There are other players who offer a similar service, but we differentiate from the competition thanks to our algorithm that can collect data automatically, thus dispensing with the drudgery of compiling them," Fabio says. "We currently cover about 2,000 funds, and we have created complete profiles for the about 500 companies that manage them. We own a catalog of information and statistics containing about 250,000 items, covering cash flow trends, performance indicators, and a lot more."

Their first clients have arrived, and many operate on international markets. "We have entered interesting markets such as New York, the United Kingdom, Switzerland," Fabio Zocchi explains, "but the one thing that really pleased us was that Alidat was officially adopted by the Master in Corporate Finance of SDA Bocconi School of Management. It is directed by Alberto Dell'Acqua, the professor who supervised my dissertation."