Item: PitchBook
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PitchBook

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PitchBook is used to source and analyze possible investment funds, helping us deepen our understanding and comparing them to peers in the same strategy. There is a broad set of useful information such as benchmarks, returns, fund contact information, previous investments that help with due dilligence and to polish our investment process.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Private company information (investment rounds, peers, news)
Private fund information(leading rounds, co-investors, key people)
Research (Asset class, industry or sector research)

Cons

I believe there could be a step up in fund data, given the amount of private funds out there I find a lot with very stale or no data at all
Features where users can input data and that goes into comparing with provided benchmarks (i do have the data they are missing and want to use their charts)
Benchmark creation or accessing could be more friendly, I feel the process is meant for planned repeated access to benchmarks but most of the times I use it as one time access and it is a longer process than it could be

Return on Investment

Workflow improvement
Sourcing improvement
Time savings

Customer Service

They are very attentive, our customer rep, [...] has a very quick response time and is always in disposition to help.

Comprehensive Data Quality

Quality of data seems good, reported by GPs vs sourced in PitchBook is almost always similar. However, I believe that they should make an effort to broaden their data sources and start covering more funds, more often than not we find funds with no data or stale data, and it is not that big of a problem for the ones we are talking to, since they provide their returns but for ones we are sourcing it almost always disqualifies them since there is no way of knowing their performance + benchmarks can be biased by this lack of data

Usability

Friendly platform, lots of options in seach criteria, easy to generate charts and intuitive menus to access information.

Alternatives Considered

Preqin

We switched over for Preqin and haven't looked back, Preqin felt as a pay-as-you-go system and as a relatively young alternatives program we kept facing paywalls so not ideal.

Key Insights

Do you think PitchBook delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with PitchBook's feature set?

Yes

Did PitchBook live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PitchBook go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PitchBook again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Bloomberg Terminal, Koyfin

Likelihood to Recommend

For investors looking for a database for specific funds, broad research and to deepen and improve their investment process I believe PitchBook is a must have tool, especially above a certain scale. It is more suited to compare large funds (KKRs, Blackstones of this world) than niche strategies but it can also help with those too.

PitchBook Feature Ratings

Comments

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