The rise of open knowledge in private markets
Sharing public research on SignalRank portfolio companies
As venture investing becomes accessible to a broader audience through retail vehicles, the need for independent company research grows. Retail investors need trusted, high quality analysis on companies, just as public equity investors do.
Open source knowledge
Open source knowledge will be increasingly valuable in the venture ecosystem.
Contrary Research, part of Contrary VC, has built perhaps the largest freely accessible library of deep dives into private technology companies, with detailed reports covering industries from AI infrastructure to cybersecurity, robotics and healthcare. Their mission is to “illuminate private markets” by making complex private companies easier to understand.
The significance of the contribution of new repositories such as Contrary Research & Not Boring is only likely to grow, building out the informational infrastructure that public markets have benefited from for decades.
The three major secondary platform acquisitions last year (Goldman Sachs buying Industry, Morgan Stanley buying EquityZen and Charles Schwab buying Forge) have already led to banks offering greater access to private companies. Clients will demand institutional quality research on the world’s fastest-growing private companies; quasi-public companies, such as Anthropic & OpenAI, have become too important to ignore. The gap between public and private market information will continue to narrow.
Public writing in VC
Long form public writing creates trust between investors and capital allocators. Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters and Howard Marks’ memos are examples.
Yet VCs were historically slow to recognize the value of storytelling in investing in general. The default mode in the industry had been to retain informational asymmetry. USV’s Fred Wilson and others changed this, making “knowledge contribution” a bigger part of the VC investing role.
Sequoia only recently shared their Apple investment memo on the 50th anniversary of Apple (for a deal that looked “very rich” at the time). It is now more commonplace for VCs to lay out their investment thesis as part of a round announcement.
These days, are you even a VC if you don’t have a podcast?
The difference between typical “why we invested” VC content and groups like Contrary (even though they are a VC themselves) is their independence, not just shilling their latest investment. They are aiming to deliver rigorous & disinterested writeups on the most compelling private companies.
AI as the next generation analyst
There’s a decent chance the next wave of this research coverage isn’t written by a person at all. AI-native financial platforms, such as Rogo & Hebbia, are already helping analysts synthesize thousands of documents into draft memos in minutes. Crunchbase just launched their own MCP this week.
Human analysts will still add differentiated insight, interviews and judgment. And AI’s hallucinations today hurt investor trust. But, ultimately, AI could make comprehensive company research economically viable at a scale that has never before been possible.
As such, we should anticipate the growth of more equity research in startups, particularly as more VCs target retail capital. If you’re going to ask ordinary people to put capital at risk, they deserve more than a pitch deck and a press release.
What this means for SignalRank
For SignalRank ourselves, we can build up on our website a living research library of third party reports on companies in the SignalRank Index. High quality independent research helps investors better understand the businesses that ultimately enter the portfolio.
We show below an initial list of decent publicly available research on our portfolio. Feel free to ping us with additional research which we can add to a research library.
Public research on SignalRank portfolio companies
Armada: Contrary research
Beehiiv: Litquidity investment memo
Chainguard: Contrary research
Cowboy Space: Not Boring investment memo / research
Earth AI: Not Boring investment memo / research
Mercor: Contrary research
Nominal: Contrary research
Northwood Space: a16z investment memo
Patronus: Greenfield investment memo
Primer: Contrary research
Saronic: Contrary research
Sesame: Contrary research
Siphox: On Healthcare research
Skild AI: Contrary research
Squint: Westly Group investment memo
Together AI: Contrary research
Truffle: a16z investment memo