Alternative Data:

The basics
Inside you will nd:

● An introduction to Alternative Data

● Traditional data and its challenges

● Unlocking the power of Alternative Data with Synaptic

● Key features of Synaptic for investors

● Future of Alternative Data

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 An introduction to Alternative Data
Alternative Data is data obtained from non-traditional sources. This data is hard to
extract, unstructured, and is often part of larger datasets, making it dif cult to
synthesize, tag, analyze, and derive insights without pre-processing.

Examples of Alternative Data include app data, website traf c, employment data,
product reviews, developer activity, geo-location, and other unconventional sources that
provide valuable information about the performance of companies.

Investors, nancial rms, asset managers, and bankers use this information to be better
informed about their investment decisions.

Traditional data and its challenges

Historically, nancial rms have tracked companies based on traditional information,
mostly provided by the companies themselves — nancial statements, regulatory SEC
lings, data on their websites, or analyst calls.

In the case of private companies, which are not legally mandated to reveal as much
information as public companies, the availability of such data is sparser — which makes
analyzing their performance a complex task. Such information is provided only
periodically to investors, is historic, and most often, not comprehensive.

However, alternative data is bringing about a transformation in investment research.

Companies leave behind a vast digital footprint as they conduct their business — created
by the companies themselves, their employees, their customers, or other stakeholders —
all of which provide unique signals.

Put together, this provides a

comprehensive assessment of a With alternative data,
company’s performance. These data
points provide early and, in some
investors and nancial rms
cases, predictive insights about the don’t have to wait for quarterly
performance of a company. These cycles to gure out trends in a
insights help investment teams and
data teams make better decisions to company’s performance.
drive their businesses forward.
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Unlocking the power of Alternative Data
with Synaptic
Investors and nancial rms have started leveraging Alternative datasets to draw
insights on start-ups, sectors, and their competitors alike. While there are many
unconventional sources of information they can target, each industry would have
datasets that would be more relevant to them. For example, website traf c would be
relevant to an eCommerce business, but it may not be relevant to a logistics company
whose primary purchases and sales are of ine.

The process of extraction and analyzing alternative data is expensive, time-consuming,

and dependent on multiple platforms for analysis. For instance, to gather data about a
company, an investor would have to purchase datasets from multiple sources, then
process them to be analysis-ready, before getting any business insights. Alternatively,
they have to rely on insights from multiple businesses- and market-intelligence
platforms to build a complete picture of a company.

Synaptic uni es Alternative Data from multiple sources on a single pane of glass, to offer
a 360-degree perspective on a company’s performance. With a layer of rich analytics
and insights algorithms built on top of this data, Synaptic allows investors to be more
agile and intelligent with their decision-making, spot early opportunities, and in
generating alpha before the competition. Built modularly to allow the addition of more
datasets, investors can improve their con dence level in the quality of signals and
insights generated, and complement their research work ows with CRM integrations.
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 Synaptic offers the following datasets — available as native data modules as well as 3rd
party datasets based on the customer’s licenses.

Data type Data Source Description

Employee/HR data Employee Data Employee count, distribution and hiring data

Glassdoor Employee rating and employee review lter

LinkUp job openings Job listings from company websites/job listing websites

Apps data App Annie* App engagement data (MAU, DAU, Downloads)

Similarweb* Desktop and Mobile website visit data. Also app engagement data

Alexa App and website engagement data

App rankings, reviews App rankings and review scrapes: Play Store & App Store

Product reviews G2 Crowd Product rating and reviews

Capterra Product rating and reviews

Github Github activity index

Search trends Google search trends Popularity of companies based on relevant keywords searched on google

Funding/deals data Crunchbase Pro Deals/transactions/people database

Public markets data Financial data Stock and nancial market data

Estimates Consensus Estimates

Earning call transcripts Transcripts, sentiment analysis of calls

Filings Filings with SEC

13 F data Tracking funds and company ownerships

Events Calls/meetings, conferences, earnings, divided/splits

Company rmographies Synaptic in-house Company meta-data: Name, domain, identi ers

Synaptic in-house Data source associations: Company IDs/pro les for datasets like LinkedIn,
Glassdoor, Crunchbase, Pitchbook, Apps, Second Measure etc.

Synaptic in-house Business model(s)

Technology Intelligence Tech Mentions Technology mentions across job openings

* Examples of 3rd part integrations dependent on customer licenses

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 Key features of Synaptic for Investors
Your personal data team — A no-code platform that is easy to use: Synaptic has a rich
AI/ML engine that provides data insights on companies without any knowledge of coding
or analysis required. Our proprietary algorithm tracks 100s of datasets to provide a
comprehensive score about the companies to its investors.

Source new and fast-growing companies: Synaptic adds 1000s of companies to the
platform every month. With a repository of hundreds of thousands of private and public
companies, it enables easy sourcing and tracking as per customizable criteria.

A single piece of glass for all your data: Preliminary or detailed due diligence on a
company or just getting updated on a company before going to a meeting with them is
now much easier with Synaptic. They can select the company of their choice and look at
performance trends across all datasets in one go. One can then delve deeper into
speci c datasets as required.

For example, while researching a new company, the user could review the recent trends
around web traf c, app ratings, and reviews to sense consumer sentiment about the
company and its products. Employee count and hiring can be a proxy for growth.
Employee reviews provide quick feedback on the management and HR practices and so
on. Viewing this data together creates a comprehensive view of a company. The platform
allows users to easily dive deeper into speci c data points.

Synaptic also allows you to share these trend lines with colleagues or to be used directly
in presentations and reports.
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 Track cohorts of companies you care about: Building and tracking the investment
pipeline is a critical task for any investor, as also investment advisors looking to identify
targets to work with. The platform allows users to pick out the best-performing
companies by using relevant lters and using the right queries on the database. Multiple
parameters around the sector, funding stage, and performance on various metrics can
be applied to lter out and select companies of interest from our database.

For example, a fund looking for early-stage enterprise SaaS companies may focus on the
number of app downloads, app ratings, and reviews only whereas someone else may
want to focus on employee count and retention rates as well. The platform offers the
exibility to choose multiple metrics to customize the selection. Synaptic allows users to
save such analyses so that these can be revisited from time to time.
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Easily compare with competitors: Competitive comparison is a common use case for
investors when they are tracking companies for investment, or their portfolio. Synaptic
provides automatic suggestions of similar companies based on our proprietary business
model tagging for all companies in our database. Investors can add multiple competitors
for comparison across different datasets and metrics tracked on the platform.

Future of Alternative Data

The alternative data transformation in investing has just begun and is increasingly
becoming a signi cant part of the investment research and decision-making process. As
the availability of data and data sources grows, more performance signals are available
to complement nancial and traditional data. Synaptic aims to make this alternative data
accessible and actionable, to build investor-friendly features on a no-code platform.
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If you want to supercharge your
investment research, reach out to us

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