Grata

AI-powered platform delivering private market intelligence for deal sourcing and diligence.

Website: https://grata.com/

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Field Value
Name Grata
Tagline AI-powered platform delivering private market intelligence for deal sourcing and diligence
Headquarters New York, NY, United States
Founded 2016
Stage Series A (acquired by Datasite, June 2025)
Business Model SaaS
Industry Private Market Intelligence / Financial Data
Technology Type AI / Machine Learning
Geography North America
Growth Profile Venture Scale
Founding Team Andrew Schorr, Andrew Bocskocsky, Nevin Raj
Funding Label Seed ($9.5M) + Series A ($25M)
Total Disclosed ~$34.5M (pre-acquisition)

Links

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Executive Summary

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Grata is a private market intelligence platform built for dealmakers in private equity, investment banking, venture capital, and corporate development. Its June 2025 acquisition by Datasite, with a reported $500M investment commitment, makes it one of the more consequential private-data outcomes of the cycle [Captured Sources, June 2025]. Founded in New York in 2016 by Andrew Schorr, Andrew Bocskocsky, and Nevin Raj, the company set out to index the small and middle-market private universe that legacy databases had historically covered thinly [Built In NYC]. Its core product applies AI extraction, machine learning, and proprietary research to surface coverage of more than 21 million companies and 10 million executive contacts, with the company claiming 99% data accuracy [Grata.com].

Grata raised approximately $9.5M in seed capital across two tranches led in part by Bling Capital, followed by a $25M Series A in February 2022 [Finsmes, April 2021] [Crunchbase]. The investor base spans Bling Capital, Accomplice, Craft Ventures, 500 Global, Altai Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures, and others, a syndicate weighted toward early-stage SaaS and fintech specialists. The differentiation rests on a purpose-built crawler and NLP stack that maps small private companies, many without filings or press, and stitches them into searchable thematic universes, a problem PitchBook and S&P historically solved less completely at the lower-middle-market end. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the integration arc with Datasite, the persistence of partnerships such as Blueflame AI and Navatar, and customer retention through the ownership transition will be the indicators worth tracking [Captured Sources, September 2025] [Captured Sources, October 2025].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, PitchBook, Finsmes, and the company website.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis Value
Stage Series A, acquired June 2025
Business Model SaaS subscription
Industry / Vertical Private Market Intelligence
Technology Type AI / ML, NLP, web extraction
Geography North America (HQ New York)
Growth Profile Venture Scale (acquired)
Founding Team Three co-founders, technical and product
Funding ~$34.5M disclosed pre-acquisition

Company Overview

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Grata was founded in 2016 in New York by Andrew Schorr, Andrew Bocskocsky, and Nevin Raj, with the thesis that the small and middle-market private company universe was structurally under-indexed by existing financial databases [PitchBook] [Built In NYC]. Schorr had previously founded an earlier 500 Startups-backed company focused on customer service via WeChat and other messaging platforms, an experience that informed the technical approach to scraping and structuring unstructured web data [Crunchbase]. The company positioned itself early as "the first private intelligence search engine for company discovery," providing a single source of truth to find small to middle-market private companies via natural language processing and machine learning applied to millions of company websites [Built In NYC].

The company's funding arc is tightly compressed. An initial $3.2M tranche led by Bling Capital closed in October 2020, followed by an additional $6.3M in seed capital in April 2021 [Finsmes, April 2021]. A $25M Series A closed on February 22, 2022, with participation from a broad syndicate including Craft Ventures, Accomplice, 500 Global, Altai Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures, and others [Crunchbase]. The company built out coverage to more than 21 million companies and 10 million executive contacts, became embedded in the workflows of mid-market private equity firms and investment banks, and reported having facilitated more than $1B in transactions across its customer base [Grata.com].

The most consequential milestone is the June 2025 acquisition by Datasite, the virtual data room and M&A workflow operator, with a reported $500M investment commitment attached to the deal [Captured Sources, June 2025]. This places Grata inside the broader Datasite stack alongside diligence and deal execution tooling, and reframes the company from a standalone intelligence vendor into the sourcing and discovery layer of an integrated M&A platform.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, PitchBook, Finsmes, and Built In NYC.

Product and Technology

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Grata's product is a search-and-discovery platform built on top of a proprietary index of private companies, organized around the workflows of dealmakers rather than the workflows of public-equity analysts [PUBLIC] [Grata.com]. The company describes its data layer as the result of "AI extraction, machine learning models, proprietary research, and data science" delivering data with claimed 99% accuracy across financials, transactions, comps, headcount estimates, and growth indicators [PUBLIC] [Grata.com]. Coverage spans 21 million-plus companies and 10 million-plus executive contacts, with an additional layer the company calls the Grata Deal Network: an exclusive feed of active mandates shared by sell-side advisors [PUBLIC] [Grata.com].

Functionally, the platform supports thematic sourcing (mapping markets, tracking segments, revealing sub-industries), similarity search (finding companies analogous to a known target), and contact-level outreach for proprietary deal origination [PUBLIC] [Grata.com]. A Company Data API exposes the underlying tagged operating data (products, services, positioning, customer relationships, pricing models) for integration into customer-built workflows [PUBLIC] [Grata.com]. On the partnership side, Grata has integrated with Blueflame AI for deal sourcing workflows (September 2025) and announced a partnership with Navatar for AI-powered deal origination on Salesforce (October 2025), both signals that the company is positioning itself as the data backbone behind other CRM and AI-agent surfaces rather than competing on UI alone [PUBLIC] [Captured Sources, 2025].

The technical differentiation, based on the company's public descriptions, sits in the extraction pipeline: NLP and ML applied at scale to company websites to tag operating attributes that do not appear in regulatory filings or news (inferred from product descriptions on Built In NYC and Grata.com). This is the layer that historically separated Grata from PitchBook (which leans on filings, press, and survey data) and from SourceScrub (which has emphasized human-curated lists from conferences and trade shows).

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Grata.com, Built In NYC, and partnership announcements.

Market Research and Opportunity

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The private market intelligence category sits at the intersection of three durable tailwinds: the secular growth of private capital AUM, the shift of investable economic activity into private hands, and the application of AI to unstructured company data.

Global private capital assets under management have grown to roughly $13 to $15 trillion as of recent industry estimates, with private equity dry powder alone consistently above $2 trillion (analogous market context, widely cited industry figures). The number of US sponsor-backed companies has multiplied over the last two decades while the number of US public companies has roughly halved from its 1990s peak, structurally pushing more deal activity, more diligence, and more sourcing into the private universe where data is harder to find. This is the demand driver underneath Grata's coverage claim of 21M+ companies, the majority of which are small private businesses that never appear in EDGAR or in traditional press [Grata.com].

The second tailwind is workflow. Private equity firms and investment banks are under pressure to industrialize sourcing, moving from relationship-driven, partner-led origination toward thematic and data-driven origination. Grata's case study with SDR Ventures describes the platform's role in supporting niche-market "advocacy campaigns" and showcasing relevant transactions in narrow industries, a workflow that maps directly onto how middle-market sponsors now build sector theses [Grata.com]. The Datasite acquisition reinforces this thesis: Datasite operates the data room layer where deals get executed, and folding sourcing intelligence into that stack creates a single workflow from theme to target list to diligence room.

The third tailwind is AI. Generative models have made it economical to extract, normalize, and reason over unstructured company data at a scale that was previously cost-prohibitive. Grata's partnerships with Blueflame AI (September 2025) and Navatar on Salesforce (October 2025) are early evidence that the agentic-workflow layer above private-company data needs a verified, structured data substrate, and that incumbents are positioning to be that substrate [Captured Sources, 2025].

Metric Value Source
Companies covered 21M+ [Grata.com]
Executive contacts 10M+ [Grata.com]
Transactions facilitated $1B+ [Grata.com]
Datasite investment commitment $500M [Captured Sources, June 2025]

The platform's coverage claims and the size of the Datasite commitment together suggest Grata had reached a scale where the strategic value to an M&A workflow incumbent meaningfully exceeded standalone venture-scale outcomes. The category is consolidating from "data vendor" to "workflow infrastructure."

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Coverage metrics confirmed by company website; macro market figures cited as analogous context only.

Competitive Landscape

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Grata competes in a private-market data category that has historically been led by PitchBook and S&P Capital IQ at the upper end and by SourceScrub and a handful of newer entrants at the middle and lower-middle market end.

Company Positioning Stage / Funding Notable Differentiator Source
Grata AI-driven private company search and sourcing Acquired by Datasite June 2025 NLP extraction across 21M+ private company websites [Grata.com] [Captured Sources, June 2025]
PitchBook Comprehensive private and public market data Subsidiary of Morningstar Depth of financial and transaction data, analyst coverage [PUBLIC]
SourceScrub Lower-middle-market sourcing platform Private, growth-stage Human-curated conference and trade show lists [PUBLIC]
DealPotential AI-enabled deal sourcing Private, early stage AI-driven matching and recommendations [PUBLIC]

The segment-by-segment map separates incumbents (PitchBook, S&P Capital IQ, Preqin) that own the upper-middle-market and institutional LP data layer from challengers (Grata, SourceScrub, DealPotential) that have focused on indexing the long tail of private companies that incumbents historically covered thinly. Adjacent substitutes include CRM-native sourcing tools (Salesforce-based workflows, of which Grata's Navatar partnership is one example) and generalist AI agents that scrape and reason over the open web on demand.

Grata's defensible edge today rests on three layers: the proprietary extraction pipeline that has been refined since 2016, the depth of the company-website index (claimed at 21M+), and now distribution through Datasite's installed base of M&A workflow customers [Grata.com]. The Datasite distribution channel is the most durable of those three, because it bundles Grata into a workflow customers already use rather than requiring standalone procurement decisions. The extraction pipeline is durable in the medium term but perishable in the long term as foundation-model capabilities commoditize unstructured-data extraction.

Where Grata is most exposed is the upper-middle-market and institutional segment, where PitchBook's depth on financials, fund returns, and LP data remains structurally ahead. PitchBook also owns the analyst-published research surface, a content moat Grata does not have. The 18-month scenario worth watching: a winning outcome would be Grata becoming the default sourcing layer for any M&A advisor running deals through Datasite, locking in distribution that standalone competitors cannot match. A losing scenario would be that the post-acquisition integration friction causes mid-market PE customers (Grata's historical core) to re-evaluate against SourceScrub or against AI-native challengers, slowing net retention during the transition year.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Subject confirmed; competitor positioning based on publicly known category structure.

Opportunity

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The headline opportunity is for Grata to become the embedded sourcing and discovery layer underneath every middle-market M&A transaction that runs through a Datasite data room.

Datasite operates one of the most widely used virtual data rooms in M&A, with reach across investment banks, sponsors, and corporate development teams globally. Bolting Grata's sourcing layer onto that distribution turns the company from a standalone SaaS subscription (where it competed for budget against PitchBook) into infrastructure (where it is bundled into a workflow customers already buy). The reported $500M investment commitment that accompanied the June 2025 acquisition signals that Datasite intends to scale Grata aggressively rather than treat it as a feature acquisition [Captured Sources, June 2025]. The plausibility of the embedded-infrastructure outcome rests on the existing partnership pattern Grata had already established pre-acquisition with Blueflame AI and Navatar, both of which validated that Grata's data is API-shaped and integrates cleanly into other workflow surfaces [Captured Sources, 2025].

Growth scenarios.

Scenario What happens Catalyst Why it's plausible
Workflow infrastructure Grata becomes default sourcing layer inside Datasite's installed base Bundled commercial offering across Datasite's M&A advisor base Datasite's $500M commitment signals integration intent [Captured Sources, June 2025]
API substrate for AI agents Grata's structured private-company data becomes the verified backbone for third-party AI sourcing agents Continued partnerships in the model of Blueflame and Navatar Two such partnerships already announced in 2025 [Captured Sources, 2025]
Geographic and vertical expansion Coverage extends deeper into European and APAC private markets and into specialized verticals Datasite's international footprint Datasite operates globally, Grata's coverage has been North America-weighted [PUBLIC]

What compounding looks like. The flywheel runs on three reinforcing loops. First, every additional deal that runs through the combined Datasite-plus-Grata stack produces transaction signal that improves the underlying comps and similar-company models. Second, every API partnership (Blueflame, Navatar, future entrants) embeds Grata's data into another customer surface, making the data harder to rip out. Third, the Deal Network (sell-side mandates contributed by advisors) is a classic two-sided network effect: more advisors contributing mandates attracts more buy-side users, which attracts more advisors [Grata.com]. The Datasite distribution channel accelerates loop two and loop three by exposing Grata to advisors who were not previously customers.

The size of the win. PitchBook was acquired by Morningstar in 2009 for approximately $225M and is now estimated to contribute over $500M in annual revenue to Morningstar, implying a standalone enterprise value comfortably in the multi-billion-dollar range based on public financial-data multiples (analogous market context). If Grata executes the workflow-infrastructure scenario inside Datasite, the relevant comparable shifts from "private data vendor" to "M&A workflow platform," a category where strategic value compounds with deal volume rather than seat count. The reported $500M Datasite investment commitment is itself a signal of the upper-bound expectation (scenario, not a forecast) [Captured Sources, June 2025].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Acquisition and investment commitment confirmed; scenario sizing based on analogous public comparables and clearly labelled as such.

Sources

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  1. [Grata.com] Grata, The Leading Private Markets Platform | https://grata.com/

  2. [Grata.com] Get Started With Grata | https://grata.com/get-started

  3. [Grata.com] We Are Unlocking The Middle Market | https://grata.com/company/about-us

  4. [Grata.com] Flexible Pricing Plans | https://grata.com/pricing

  5. [Grata.com] Grata Deal Network | https://grata.com/features/grata-deal-network

  6. [Grata.com] Company Data API | https://grata.com/api

  7. [Grata.com] How SDR Ventures Explores Niche Markets with Grata | https://grata.com/case-studies/grata-fying-success-how-sdr-ventures-plunges-into-niche-markets

  8. [Crunchbase] Grata Company Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grata-data

  9. [Crunchbase] Grata Series A Funding Round | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/grata-data-series-a--9a60091c

  10. [Crunchbase] Andrew Schorr Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/person/andrew-schorr

  11. [PitchBook] Grata 2026 Company Profile | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/174283-12

  12. [Built In NYC] Grata NYC Office, Careers, Perks and Culture | https://www.builtinnyc.com/company/grata

  13. [Finsmes, April 2021] Grata Raises Further $6.3M in Seed Funding | https://www.finsmes.com/2021/04/grata-raises-further-6-3m-in-seed-funding.html

  14. [LinkedIn] Grata Company Page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/grata-data

  15. [ZoomInfo] Grata Overview | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/grata/357631965

  16. [Dakota] Bling Capital Secures $270M on Fund IV Final Close | https://www.dakota.com/fundraising-news/bling-capital-secures-270m-on-fund-iv-final-close

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