Welcome to the March edition of Neudata Tidbits for Data Providers.

This month, we take a look at the surge of fundraising activity among data providers and discuss the buy-side’s growing interest in the APAC market (and the implications that follow with sourcing and accessing data within this region).  If you're interested in more alternative data insights from Neudata, sign up for Premium access to Neudata Provider here. 

THE RISE OF SPACs IN THE ALT DATA SPACE
March has been a busy month for data firms — there has been several successful funding rounds for patent, automotive, vessel and social media sentiment providers, some of whom are achieving multi-billion dollar valuations. The increase in capital flowing into this space proves that alternative data is becoming more mainstream and essential within the investment process. Some data companies are even opting to go public through special-purpose acquisition companies (also known as SPACs).

The boom in SPAC deals was one of the biggest stories of 2020 and looks likely to continue through 2021. As of March 2021, 297 SPAC IPOs — with an average IPO size of $325m — were announced. In the past month alone, data vendors Otonomo, Spire, BlackSky and Wejo were either in conversation or opted to go public through this structure. Despite the popularity of SPACs, data providers are still pursuing traditional IPO opportunities and it seems unlikely that this trend toward massive fundraising will slow down anytime soon.

ALTERNATIVE DATA IN APAC 
The APAC region has always been a hot topic in the alternative data space. But until recent years, this market was underrepresented relative to American and European data. One reason was strict government regulations in East Asia, which meant the penetration and exportation of data in these markets was very restricted, and therefore resulted in less coverage among data vendors that service Western investment management clients.

However, in the past five years, China has been rapidly evolving its regulatory environment. Numerous measures, industry standards and laws concerning cyberspace governance have been newly enacted and this has made it easier for data sellers to source data from China.

We are currently experiencing a big increase in demand for transactional, web-scraping and ESG data in the APAC region from our buy-side clients. This month, we had 15 clients request an introduction with data vendors providing coverage on China, Japan and Korea.

Do you have a data offering that provides transactional or ESG data covering APAC? If so, please reply to this email or reach out to research@neudata.co to tell us about it.

NEUDATA'S SPRING SUMMIT 
Did you miss Neudata’s Spring Summit last week? If you’d like to read a recap of what was discussed, you can do so on Neudata News.

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Day One – Tuesday’s session focused on the outlook for alternative data in 2021 and featured real case-studies from buy-side practitioners.
Day Two – Wednesday’s session featured panel discussions on NLP, web-scraping, ESG and crypto.
Day Three – Thursday’s session featured a discussion on alternative data M&A, the changing regulatory landscape and more.

PEOPLE MOVES
Make sure you check out our people moves section, which recaps the latest job moves in the alternative data industry. If you want us to recap your new job or latest promotion, get in touch with Sondra at sondra@neudata.co.

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