This week, we analyze Bloomberg’s recently announced acquisition of Canoe Intelligence. More on that below.
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Bloomberg levels up its private markets offerings
On July 29th, Bloomberg announced the acquisition of Canoe Intelligence, a data management and intelligence platform that extracts data from fund documents and delivers reports on private market funds. Canoe last raised a $36 million Series C in July 2024, led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Bloomberg and Canoe previously announced a partnership in April 2026 in which Canoe automated the delivery of alternative and private fund data into Bloomberg PORT Enterprise to streamline cross-asset risk analysis.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though Citywire reported that the company sold at 20x current revenue at a valuation between $750m and $1bn. Asymmetrix estimates Canoe’s FY2026 revenue to be $45m, implying an enterprise value of $900m. Based on our revenue growth estimate of 45%, that implies a forward EV/Revenue multiple of 13.8x.
The context
Bloomberg’s acquisition of Canoe follows a marked uptick in acquisitions of private markets Data & Analytics providers made by financial data giants in recent years. Notable deals include:
MSCI’s acquisition of Burgiss in 2023;
BlackRock’s acquisition of Preqin in 2024;
S&P Global’s acquisition of With Intelligence in 2025.
The flurry of acquisitions parallels the rise of private markets from a niche asset class to a major force in the broader financial services industry. More pointedly, as private markets investment products increasingly mimic public market products and comprise a larger part of institutional investor portfolios, major financial data providers are compelled to offer robust private markets datasets alongside their public market offerings.
Demand for private markets-focused data providers – once a niche corner of the financial data sector – has exploded as a result. The aforementioned providers – whose most valuable datasets are GP and fund performance data – all traded at valuations north of 12x EV/Revenue, a premium to typical Data & Analytics multiples.
Based on reported multiples and our estimates, Canoe’s estimated 13.8x forward revenue multiple is in line with the valuations earned by private markets data providers, despite the company’s more software-oriented product. To wit, S&P Global acquired With Intelligence for 13.8x revenue in 2025.
Burgiss, Preqin and With Intelligence spent decades accumulating high-quality fund performance data. The financial data giants coveted these data assets because they saw public and private markets converging – and a chance to build the first-to-market products that convergence would demand. For some strategics – such as S&P and MSCI – the aim is to leverage performance datasets to develop investable products and indices that track private market assets. For BlackRock, and now Bloomberg, the goal is to ensure that their solutions cover every asset type in institutional portfolios.
What Canoe can do for you
Canoe’s platform serves as “connective tissue between many general partners (GPs) and limited partners (LPs)” by extracting fund performance, cash flow and allocation data from more than 1.5 million documents of more than 44,000 funds each month. Canoe delivers insights to 500+ clients spanning institutional investors, fund servicers, wealth managers and family offices.
The combination of Canoe’s private markets solutions with Bloomberg’s public markets data will offer clients an “Integrated Total Portfolio View” in which they can monitor and analyze their public and private markets portfolio in one platform. The rationale for Bloomberg’s acquisition of Canoe is strikingly similar to BlackRock’s thesis in acquiring Preqin: offering Aladdin clients a “whole portfolio” product in which they can view both public and private assets in one. The payoff is clear: better risk and cash management on a single, streamlined workflow.
The acquisition will also enable fund screening and benchmarking workflows for Bloomberg clients, a workflow that investors historically ran outside the Bloomberg Terminal with providers like Preqin and With Intelligence or consultants like Cambridge Associates and StepStone Group’s SPI.
Row or sink
Per proprietary intelligence obtained by Asymmetrix, Bloomberg participated in the Preqin sale process in 2024 and was one of three finalists. After losing out on Preqin, Bloomberg focused on building private markets solutions in house and through partnerships. Bloomberg hired aggressively in 2025 to build out its private markets solutions and struck a few partnership deals, including one with investment firm Hamilton Lane that saw the integration of fund performance indices, as well as the partnership with Canoe earlier this year.
The decision to build instead of buy was not surprising to most Data & Analytics industry observers: Bloomberg has bought relatively few assets over the years, especially when considering its size.
So why buy now? Surely Bloomberg can build similar – if not better – capabilities than Canoe’s. But capability was never the constraint – the network was. Bloomberg can build a document-extraction engine; it cannot build relationships with 44,000 funds and 500 clients quickly. But to capture the rising demand for private markets products, Bloomberg had to move fast; they couldn’t wait to build solutions, go to market and grow a book of business. Acquiring Canoe means acquiring a network of financial institutions and a steady flow of data that ensures scale and a competitive product – immediately. And the existing partnership likely gave Bloomberg the inside track – and a reason not let a rival strategic take Canoe instead.
Why buy software?
The key distinction between the Canoe deal and the Preqin and With Intelligence deals: like Burgiss, Canoe is ultimately a software product that automates private markets data collection, whereas Preqin and With are pure play private markets data providers. Canoe and Burgiss are “connective tissue” – they enable the sharing or extraction of fund data between stakeholders – and therefore have access to underlying fund data that can be used to create aggregated and anonymized benchmarks, even though selling that data is not their core business. Preqin and With, in contrast, are in the business of selling fund performance datasets, not plumbing and workflow solutions.
The simplest explanation for why Bloomberg did not acquire a pure-play data provider is that the best such assets, like Preqin and With, were already taken. But even if those assets were available, acquiring them may not have accomplished Bloomberg’s stated goal of offering a fully integrated total portfolio view, which Canoe’s platform does enable. Further, there is an argument that acquiring the “connective tissue” layer offers both portfolio management tools and access to higher quality fund performance data than third party data providers can offer. The same logic applies to MSCI’s acquisition of Burgiss: principally a portfolio-monitoring platform for LPs, it generates a dataset of observed fund performance as exhaust.
To be sure, Asymmetrix has heard from several sources inside Bloomberg and industry observers that this acquisition is “a start.” The integration of Canoe’s software tools and datasets does not immediately fill all of the company’s gaps and does not put it on equal footing with MSCI and S&P’s private markets offerings just yet.
What’s next?
Asymmetrix is closely watching where Bloomberg moves from here. Bloomberg’s strategic investment in Daphne in 2025, subsequent integration and board representation mean it already has a foot in the door. If they ultimately acquire Daphne, Bloomberg can create a closed-loop private markets data ecosystem; Bloomberg will ingest fund performance and cash flow data from LPs via Canoe and publish GP fund performance to the Terminal via Daphne. Bloomberg would be swimming in observed, direct-from-the-source private markets fund data.
One caveat this thesis has to clear: Canoe’s value to LPs rests on its neutrality as plumbing, and though they have come to market with fund performance benchmarks, it is unclear to what extent they have data rights to create additional data products. Other providers in this space, such as Burgiss, have been able to sell data generated through their software business, primarily by creating aggregated and anonymized benchmarks rather than profiles of specific funds. Canoe is – at best – limited to only offering aggregated and anonymized benchmarks.
Though they claim to have robust private markets solutions, several other financial data strategics have remained on the sidelines, opting to build and market existing solutions instead of making large acquisition. FactSet and LSEG, in particular, may be pressured by public market investors to acquire a more substantive private markets dataset to boost their offerings. Providers like PEI Group, which is expected to transact in the near- to medium-term, may be viable targets. Expect the pressure to increase.
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