Equiam

Over the past five years, EQUIAM’s investment team has developed and refined a model central to the firm’s data-driven investment approach. This model systematically and methodically distills a universe of 7,000+ companies into a dynamic list of alpha generating targets for the EQUIAM portfolio, generating unique indicators across various company attributes including firmographics, financials, talent and health.

Private market investing is uniquely challenging given the lack of information compared to public markets. However, EQUIAM’s systematic approach allows them to limit the biases and inefficiencies of human-centered strategies while maintaining a deal funnel significantly larger than traditional private market investors.

To create a best-in-class model, the EQUIAM team realized they also needed the best-in-class data across all aspects of the businesses they evaluate. The team holds very high standards for the type of data they use to generate their investment insights, and all data sources are assessed across several key considerations.

The first bar in considering any data source is breadth, as any potentially viable data source must cover the broad universe of companies evaluated within the EQUIAM model. Here, the team pays particular attention to tracking historical data for companies that have undergone significant rebrandings, which often leaves critical coverage gaps in the data profiles of some of the highest-growth assets. The second consideration is consistency, since maintaining a data standardization process across various data sources is key.

The EQUIAM strategy leverages data sources encompassing a wide variety of company attributes. However, with talent data, the team found it difficult to find a data source that met their evaluation criteria and was on the same level of quality as their existing data sources. To ensure that EQUIAM had best-in-class talent and people data, the EQUIAM team partnered with People Data Labs to help source the data to power their talent and people signals.

With a comprehensive range of talent data, EQUIAM has uncovered new approaches for evaluating employee growth and retention trends, leading to the integration of novel signals into their model. Working alongside a team of data experts has allowed EQUIAM to expedite their integration of this dataset and deepen their ability to derive unique insights from the data. With direct access to the core of the datasets they work with, EQUIAM has been able to recommend impactful data enhancements and additions right at the point of data creation.

With this partnership in place, the investment team at EQUIAM continues to successfully execute on finding the best potential investment, solidifying their distinct competitive advantage and setting the stage for a long-lasting data partnership alongside People Data Labs.