eVestment, a provider of traditional and hedge fund data and analytics for the institutional investing community, is launching new offerings in the private equity and venture capital arenas.
To serve institutional investors who are increasingly investing in private market funds, eVestment has acquired TopQ, an innovator in private equity analytics based in Edinburgh, Scotland. At the same time, eVestment is announcing the pending launch of a new and expansive private equity dataset in the second half of 2015 and will begin development immediately to integrate TopQ with the new eVestment dataset. With these moves, eVestment continues to deliver on its commitment to provide institutional quality data and analytics tools across all major asset classes – creating a secure environment to efficiently exchange information and enabling more effective manager selection and monitoring. The TopQ acquisition closed on Thursday, May 28. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
TopQ provides private equity limited partners with a faster, more effective way to conduct due diligence both pre- and post-commitment with the ability to quickly screen fund facets, dissect track records and analyze investment scenarios in multiple ways. Private equity general partners benefit from a secure and efficient method for sharing information while fundraising, while also distributing ongoing results with investors. Additionally general partners will be able to utilize this platform to more readily benchmark and compare their funds with the broader private equity market.
To augment the TopQ technology and to promote private equity analysis across its full product suite, eVestment has been steadily building out an extensive private equity dataset, including information on general partners, key professionals, investment funds, fund performance, fund investors and portfolio company data. At launch, the dataset will provide a view of limited partners and key information about their fund line-ups. eVestment will also provide universe level information by geography, vintage year, industry focus, stage focus and fundraising status so that similar funds can be more easily compared.
"Institutional investors have invested more than $3 trillion with private equity firms globally, and that amount is only going to increase as those investors continue to seek diversity in their investment portfolios," says Jim Minnick, eVestment CEO and co-founder. "This acquisition and our own private equity data efforts give eVestment a strong position in this arena and we look forward to further growing our ability to serve clients in this space."
"Our clients have been amazed by what TopQ can do for them and becoming part of eVestment brings the scale and resources necessary to enhance and expand the application and make it available globally," said Graham Paterson, TopQ co-founder. "With its leadership in institutional investment data and nearly 1,000 institutional investors as clients, eVestment will now be able to offer the broad private equity technology and data solutions that the institutional investor community has been seeking."
