The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Eagle Alpha is a Dublin, Ireland headquartered alternative data marketplace and advisory firm that connects institutional data buyers with the vendors producing non-traditional datasets used in investment research. Its core platform lets subscribers search, profile and evaluate several thousand alternative datasets (the company's own site currently lists 2,000+, organized across 16 categories and 56 sub-categories under its own taxonomy), request trials, and manage vendor relationships from discovery through data delivery and ongoing monitoring. Alongside the marketplace, an advisory arm carries out bespoke work such as sourcing a dataset for a specific research question, building alternative-data-driven models, and running strategic data-integration projects for buyside teams. Eagle Alpha does not produce data itself; it sits one layer up as a broker, aggregator and advisor between data producers and buyers, which distinguishes it from vendors that sell their own proprietary datasets. Its client base spans quantitative and discretionary hedge funds, traditional asset managers, private equity firms and corporates, a broader net than the hedge-fund-centric focus the alternative data category started with, and the company also markets to central banks and government bodies. A further differentiator is compliance tooling: Surveyor, a workflow product released in 2022, is built for monitoring data vendor due-diligence questionnaires and storing records for SEC regulatory exams, covering an operational and compliance need that pure discovery marketplaces typically leave to the buyer. Eagle Alpha was founded in 2012 by Emmett Kilduff, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Kilduff served as CEO through 2022 and now holds the Founder and Executive Chairman title; Michael Finnegan, previously the company's Chief Revenue Officer, is the current CEO, with Ciaran Ryan as COO and Thomas Combes as CTO. The company says its platform has been used by more than 1,000 data buyers and that it now serves over 100 financial services clients. It raised at least $8.7 million (€7.8 million) in funding through its last publicly disclosed round, a $2.4 million raise announced in August 2019 that was its largest to date, backed by Ireland's state enterprise agency Enterprise Ireland alongside angel investors. Eagle Alpha has run a partnership with data-analytics platform Exabel since 2022, letting clients move from dataset discovery on Eagle Alpha's marketplace directly into signal testing on Exabel's platform. It also hosts an annual Alternative Data Conference, most recently in New York in September 2025, where programming centered on how generative AI and protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) are changing the speed of alternative-data-driven signal development, and it publishes an annual Alternative Data Report tracking industry trends.
