PrivCo: Making a researcher's life easier
Jinfo Blog

By Helen Clegg

Abstract

Part of an information professional’s job is to be able to navigate the ever-growing landscape of research tools, whether free or subscription-based, and make an informed decision on the most appropriate tool to use from the myriad available. This article highlights the benefits of the PrivCo database, which is filling a gap in the market by providing detailed private company financial information, including insight into funding, venture capital and M&A activities. This is a short version of a more detailed review published in the FreePint Subscription. Subscribers can login now to view.

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What’s the difference between a company’s revenue figures and sales figures? A lot, if you’re PrivCo – the new kid on the block when it comes to providing private US company financial information.  Information professionals have always had a hard time searching for reliable financial information on private companies in the US. It’s just not available like it is for publicly traded companies. So that means more diligent searching, leveraging social media tools, looking for new sources – in fact, using all possible networks to find tidbits of information that can be pieced together to draw a decent picture of the company in question – and after all the effort, the picture isn’t always that good. Researching a private US company takes time, which can be in short supply when there’s a heavy work load to get through.

This is where the PrivCo database can make a researcher’s life much easier. Why spend hours trawling through various sources, when you can leverage PrivCo to pinpoint accurate financial information on US private companies? Instead of making do with a few sales figures, PrivCo aims to provide revenue figures, employee counts and productivity charts that are ready to download into Excel, as well as detailed funding, venture capital activity and M&A deal data.

Of note is PrivCo’s own industry classification system, which makes it much easier to conduct a search for players in relatively new industry sectors that are shaping today’s landscape - for example, blogs and blogging, Internet music and radio, mobile media or carbon management.

Information professionals new to researching private companies and trying to come to grips with understanding the financing of the private market will find the PrivCo Knowledge Bank useful. It’s a mini encyclopedia, explaining most of the common terms used. It makes getting up to speed on the different terms easy.

While corporate libraries and large information departments will likely consider PrivCo as a resource to add to their collections, that doesn’t mean it’s not available to individuals. In fact, individual reports can be purchased online, so users don’t have to be corporate heavyweights to gain access. PrivCo is definitely worth checking out for that hard-to-find information on private companies. In this reviewer’s opinion, this product stands head and shoulders above some of the other commercial databases which have been around for longer.

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