Whisper is a data-as-a-service provider that structures and indexes the worlds private technology markets. Unlike a web search tool like Google, data in Whisper is structured by meaning, not markup. Instead of websites, we have entities like people, organizations, technologies, and products. People entities have attributes like name, job title, and skillset . Organization entities have attributes like sector, revenue, and list of employees.
Each entity is the result of crawling, structuring, and processing hundreds of millions of pages on the web, generating billions of facts, and linking those facts to each entity. Whisper allows you to search the web as a humongous graph database of entities, filtered by their attributes. We’re starting with information on the public web first but plan on merging it with third-party datasets over time, unlocking insights in private markets that were not possible before.
One of the biggest themes in the last 20 years has been products that help companies manage and use first party data better. If you invested in that trend, you had an amazing two decades. Those companies include core tools like CRM's (Salesforce, HubSpot), BI (Tableau, Alteryx), big data analytics (Palantir, Splunk), data cloud platforms (Snowflake, Databricks), and many many more.
The amount of collected first party data and its consumption has grown exponentially due to better tools, increased internet usage, and more business activity coming online. Companies are getting better and better at managing their own data. At the same time, compute and storage costs continue to fall dramatically every year, so it is becoming cheaper and cheaper to process larger volumes of information.
First-party data is not enough
Most industries have spent the last 10 years building internal data science teams, they've hired the right talent, built the infrastructure and have gotten very good at taking their internal data and doing something with it. But even the most advanced organizations are now reaching an asymptote where there's only marginal value they can get from mining their own information. As markets get more competitive, asset managers and companies of all sizes will look externally for third-party sources more and more.
This is happening across industries.
An order of magnitude more companies buy data today, than they did five years ago. One great example is hedge funds. The demand for third party or “external” datasets naturally developed here at a faster pace than other industries because the fundamental business of investing is looking at other peoples companies from an outside-in view. This idea of using external data to make more calculated decisions is not new, and it’s being applied to new verticals in pursuit of an information advantage. If you know something that competitors in your market don't, you can exploit it.
Unless you're active in these industries, there's a good chance you've never heard of these providers before. Although they serve very different markets, they all share something in common. These providers create common knowledge in their industries from information only middlemen had access to before, from public-but-hard-to aggregate data, or from information collected from users themselves. Instead of trying to hoard information, these vendors become the authoritative source on an industry or market at scale. Owning demand for a given dataset gives these companies a compounding advantage, allowing them to own search for their market and build monopolies.
The data-as-a-service market is evolving.