The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Neudata is a data-scouting and intelligence firm that helps institutional investors, chiefly hedge funds, asset managers and quantitative strategists, find, evaluate and select alternative data sources rather than selling data itself. Its core product is Scout, a platform (now in a second version) that catalogues thousands of alternative and market datasets with searchable metadata, filtering by investment universe, ticker, product or brand, vendor profiles and analyst-written evaluations; a companion tool, Ranger, and the AltDating programme add structured one-to-one matchmaking meetings between data sellers and qualified buyers. Neudata's differentiation within the alternative data category is that it sits on the discovery and due-diligence side of the market rather than the supply side: it does not license or resell the underlying datasets, and says it takes no commission on sales its introductions generate, positioning itself as an independent research layer between data buyers and the roughly thousand-plus vendor universe it tracks. This makes it closer to a research and matchmaking intermediary than to a data marketplace or a data vendor, and its client base is described as covering the large majority of global institutional alternative-data spending. The firm was founded in 2016 in London by Rado Lipus, who previously worked in quantitative portfolio construction and risk management at MSCI (Barra) and S&P Capital IQ and as a managing director at PerTrac. It has grown to a team of analysts split across offices in London, New York and Shanghai (an earlier period of the company's history also included a Geneva office), covering data providers across equities, currencies, commodities, fixed income and derivatives markets. Neudata publishes an annual "State of the Alternative Data Market" report; its 2026 edition, based on the 2,805 datasets listed on Scout plus a buyer survey, estimated industry-wide alternative data spending at approximately 2.8 billion US dollars in 2025, up 17 percent year on year, and found the average dataset was used by around 20 investment clients, down from 25 in 2024. Neudata's most recent published research highlights a gap between AI adoption and vendor spending: its 2026 report found that while AI usage among investment firms accelerated through 2025, most of that usage went toward internal productivity and workflow efficiency rather than investment strategy optimisation, and that AI features added by data vendors did not translate into higher client spend. The firm continues to run in-person industry summits, including events scheduled in New York and San Francisco for 2026.
