34x growth in 14 years & a $3B+ exit to Blackrock. Meet Preqin: the private markets data compounder

Disclaimer: Unless noted otherwise, views and analysis expressed here are the author's own and based on public sources. The article is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. This is not financial advice. Please consult a professional for investment decisions.

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We are living in dangerous times. Wherever you look, news headlines scream imminent calamity. S&P 500 peaking! Gold peaking! Oh wait, gold dropping! Trade wars! Rare earths! 

Well, almost everywhere. In private markets it’s still party time. True, Private Equity and Private Debt fundraising has slowed sharply due to scarcity of exits and concerns about credit quality, respectively. But what about the frenetic pace of dealmaking involving private markets data providers?

Just last week, S&P paid $1.8B for With Intelligence. The deal came hot on the heels of BlackRock’s $3.2B acquisition of Preqin, With Intelligence's competitor and British compatriot. 

Both deals were done at 14x revenue: extraordinary, even by today’s frothy standards. What’s so special about firms that aggregate fund returns? 

Two things:

One, the market has been on a tear. According to McKinsey, between 2000 and 2023, private markets AuM increased 20-fold: from $600B to $13 trillion. In a Picks-and-Shovels play, data providers have benefitted from the drive for transparency around performance, fees, and manager diligence.  

Two, scarcity value. For Blackrock, which has gone all-in on alternatives (as evidenced from the acquisitions of eFront, HPS and GIP), the missing link was pre-investment capabilities. Meanwhile, the list of eligible targets was dwindling fast. Pitchbook was acquired by Morningstar already in 2016 (more on that later). MSCI gobbled up Burgiss for $1B+. Datasite acquired Grata (and, subsequently, Sourcescrub). 

As one former Blackrock staffer told me, “At the end of the day, what’s $3B for a $180B market cap company? The leadership thinks strategically and sold this deal to the Board on the basis of a potential multiple re-rating as Blackrock’s revenue becomes less and less tethered to public market gyrations”. 

Today, we are going to tell you the story of Preqin: a private markets data compounder like no other.  

Preqin is an iconoclast:

It chose not to raise outside equity funding. Throughout its history, it has fiercely resisted Private Equity’s advances. 

It is not based in North America - home to 61% of private markets AuM (source). 

Its growth strategy was largely organic (although it made one, extremely well-timed acquisition). 

Finally, Preqin’s business model remains surprisingly analogue. Its data comes from two main sources: Freedom of Information Requests to public US LPs and one-on-one conversations with fund managers.  

This article marks an important evolution of RollUpEurope. We are no longer content to write about serial acquirers only. We are expanding coverage to include all sorts of compounders. Those that have grown through M&A and those that haven't. The common denominator is the track record of compounding over the long term.         

With a 14-year revenue CAGR of 29% (34x absolute increase!), Preqin fits that description very well. 

Read on to learn about:

1. Preqin’s beginnings: A Texas endowment, FOIA, and the reporters that just wouldn't give up 

2. Preqin’s growth playbook that fuelled revenue growth from $8M to $235M 

3. The virtue of patience. Plus: the competitor that sold WAY too early  

This article is sponsored by Grata: investment-grade intelligence, a high-signal community, and agentic AI built for M&A. By combining proprietary data, active deal networks, and exclusive market signals across North America and Europe, Grata brings global visibility to private markets that have long been opaque. The result: faster sourcing, sharper screening, and stronger conviction, wherever opportunity emerges.

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1. Preqin’s beginnings: A Texas endowment, FOIA, and the reporters that just wouldn't give up

To understand the circumstances in which Preqin was founded, let’s go back to the early 2000s US. The dotcom bubble had just burst. The Enron bankruptcy had rattled the nation. The pressure on public LPs was mounting. 

For 3 years, the reporters from Houston Chronicle had been harassing scrutinising the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO). Suspecting impropriety in UTIMCO’s private markets division (specifically, a conflict of interest that led to suboptimal asset allocation), the reporters were desperate to access UTIMCO’s performance data. The magic word was the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA - a US federal law that gives the public the right to access government records.  

Finally, in the fall of 2002 the reporters prevailed. UTIMCO became the first public LP in the US to disclose performance data for the private markets holdings. This decision triggered a tsunami of lawsuits across the country, often filed by journalists. Predictably, the GPs fought back, limiting the extent of disclosure to public LPs. According to one academic paper:

“After the lawsuits, the performance information of top VC firms was more likely to be missing... This reporting gap also holds for top VCs… suggesting that some public LPs agreed to the contractual innovation and limited the scope of the information they receive from VCs”

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, the British entrepreneurs Mark O’Hare and Nick Arnott were pushing their own FOIA request with Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Trust (PRIT). Like the Houston Chronicle crew, eventually they prevailed. 

Mark and Nick had an unfair advantage: they knew how to monetise public data.  

4 years prior, they had sold to Reuters a data business called Citywatch (Nick was a Director in that business). Citywatch was a shareholder information service that trawled the share registers of the UK's largest quoted companies. According to a press article, “Reuters already makes available this basic information, but Citywatch also offers a sophisticated service over the Internet which tracks share ownership over periods”. 

Citywatch sold for £2.5M after 5 years (source). Mark’s next venture was going to take much longer - and sell for 1000x more.  

2. Preqin’s growth playbook that fuelled revenue growth from $8M to $235M

In this chapter, we highlight 3 initiatives that were instrumental in driving Preqin’s topline from £5M ($8M) in 2010 to £184M ($235M) in 2024. In other words, a 34-fold increase in revenue in GBP terms / 28x in USD terms.   

To be clear, this is not a definitive account of Preqin’s history. Rather, we picked out 3 decisions that we believe helped Preqin leapfrog the competition:   

1. Building authority and a distinct brand

2. One well-timed acquisition

3. Staying independent for as long as possible 

Let’s start with decision #1. Preqin’s real leg-up came after the Global Financial Crisis, which shifted the balance of power away from Wall Street banks and public market fund managers, to private market firms like Blackstone, KKR and Brookfield. Fund flows began to “barbell” i.e. to bifurcate between low-cost, passively managed products like ETFs and alternatives products like private equity and infrastructure - at the expense of long-only fund managers. 

But how does a small British company attract the attention of asset owners and their consultants - firms like NEPC and Mercer? 

Firstly, by recruiting an industry heavyweight as Board Chairman. Anthony Habgood joined Preqin in 2011. Having previously turned around the industrial conglomerate Bunzl, in 2009 Anthony was elected the Chair of Reed Elsevier (now RELX) - a leading specialist analytics provider and currently the UK’s 12th most valuable public company. You could do worse than learn from the parent company of LexisNexis!   

Secondly, from the get-go Preqin courted not only potential customers, but also opinion leaders like journalists and academics. Among the dozen or so KPIs listed in Preqin’s annual reports from the early 2010s we find things like “Press mentions quoting Preqin data” and “Output of published research”. 

Preqin’s genius move was to publish free snippets of products like “Private Equity Performance Report Fund Data as of Q2 2009”. By 2009, the clunky “Private Equity Intelligence” had rebranded to Preqin. Preqin was discoverable, and in time it became ubiquitous. 

Now, onto factors #2 and #3.   

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