Find attractive business opportunities amongst millions of European private companies – using the latest technology

Valu8 Company Intelligence facilitates the European deal origination progress using the latest technology.

1. Who we are

Valu8 Company Intelligence is a European platform for accelerating Private Equity and M&A deal origination.

Valu8 aggregates and enhances data for more than 75 million private and public companies in 18 European countries. Our customers use the platform to screen and explore companies from aggregated sector analysis down to target short lists and detailed company data. We aim to track all registered companies in each European region that we cover. Our core markets are DACH, UK and the Nordic region.

2. Data philosophy – we think of data in pyramids

Good data is difficult to obtain! Regardless of structured data or alternative data, we focus on aggregating, structuring, and automating qualitative company and M&A data.

The base for our data is an aggregation of more than 70 million European companies’ financial statements, group structures, owners, UBOs, board and key individuals, available directly or indirectly via a large amount of European local registries. The strength, apart from a time-consuming data source selection process and data aggregation work over time in each region, lies in the simple fact that this data is easily available to obtain as other web based data.

The second layer consists of our premium coverage of now more than 15 million European companies with highly qualitative data sets, where our base data is enriched with value enhancing unstructured data e.g. web scraped URL data, social media data, web traffic data, people network data etc., using automisation and new technologies.

At the very top, we work with carefully selected, use-case enhanced data sets. Examples are ownership data and M&A and PE transaction data. In these cases, our technology is assisted by qualitative data building by our content team.

Our philosophy builds on using the best data intelligence available, technology driven or by human professionals.

“We add value in the first 90% of the deal sourcing process, providing enriched data and a technology driven search platform, ensuring that our users don’t miss out on any potential targets. So far, the last sourcing mile is best performed by the M&A professional, but with algorithms improving, we aim to deliver increasingly precise results over time, gradually moving into to the last 10%.”

Anders Lundgren, Founder and CEO

3. Machine Learning & NLP Enhancements

Machine learning and natural language processing (“NLP”) based enhancements are well suited for several key areas related to our sourcing technologies.

Our dedicated objective is to be able to deliver high levels of accuracy in finding relevant European targets or peers in any non-traditional sector or niche subsector.

4. Sector and company classifications & similarity scoring

We are excited about moving into a new generation of our sector and company classifications, from launching our first-generation NLP based sector keywords and classifications three years ago. During the past year, our data science team has deep dived into the latest models including GPT 4 with impressive and sometimes surprising results. A recent regression analysis1 comparing results accuracy vs cost of NLP model approaches shows how the accuracy tapers drastically off in terms of precision but the cost increases 1000-fold with the current API prices.

“While we suspected that a fine-tuned model would perform the best, it’s interesting to see how precision versus cost tapers off… It shows that bigger is not always better and choosing a model is always about weighing the trade-offs, especially when cost is a factor.”

Kajsa Norin, Data Scientist and Valu8 Partner

5. Networks

In March 2023, we were delighted to launch our latest project Networks into our platform, enabling our customers to discover hidden stakeholders and relationships, networks and ownership clusters surrounding a company – not only directly linked but connected in second, third or even fourth level to a company.

Using advanced graph data science technology, our users can easily view, adjust and zoom into the “spiderwebs” of networks surrounding a company or an individual.

By combining all our data sources as well as advanced methods and probability scorings to fill the sometimes very challenging “data gaps”, we are gradually improving the level of accuracy and expanding the network cross borders in Europe. Networks is still in Beta version.

With more than 500 organisations in Europe and globally using our platform we offer a personalised product that meets the specific needs of each user and can be customised for different industries or segments.

With backgrounds from the M&A industry, our team aims to have a pro-active approach with our users, using our customers’ feedback to constantly improve our product offer over time.

Find out more at www.valu8group.com

1 Source: Performance Benchmarking and Cost Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques: An Investigation into Traditional and State-Of-The-Art Models in Business Operations, by Jacob Lundgren, Sam Taheri, KTH, School for electrotechnics and data science (EECS). Supervised by Kajsa Norin. Valu8 participated as a partner. Link to thesis: https://lnkd.in/dT_fe88K