The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Thinknum Alternative Data is a New York based company that builds structured, queryable datasets by indexing public web pages at scale. Its platform crawls company websites, job boards, app stores, retail store locators and social channels, then converts what it finds into time series such as open job listings, headcount, product pricing, store counts, vehicle inventory and app or social media engagement, refreshed daily and delivered through a web interface, downloadable feeds and an API rather than raw scraped files. The firm specialises in giving investment analysts and corporate strategy teams signal on both public and private companies, which sets it apart from data vendors that only cover SEC filers or index listed names. Because its underlying method is scraping and structuring publicly available web pages rather than licensing a single proprietary feed, Thinknum can extend to new data categories and new companies without needing a data sharing partnership, and its self serve query, visualization, alerting and dashboard widget tools are built for analysts without an engineering or data science background. Thinknum was founded in 2014 by Gregory Ugwi and Justin Zhen, former college classmates who had each separately hit the same wall of finding structured web data to feed investment models; the company joined the 500 Startups accelerator in San Francisco within two months of founding, closed a $1 million seed round before Demo Day, and says it turned profitable in 2016. It raised an $11.6 million Series A led by Green Visor Capital in March 2019, taking total funding to roughly $12.6 million. Thinknum describes its coverage as several hundred thousand public and private companies across dozens of structured dataset categories, and names Balyasny Asset Management, Consumer Edge Research and Fifth Wall among its clients; its research and commentary have been cited by Bloomberg, the Financial Times and Nasdaq. As of December 2025 the company's blog was still publishing regular alternative data research, including an analysis of OpenAI's own job postings that used Thinknum's hiring dataset to argue the AI lab is shifting hiring emphasis toward safety and security roles, a sign the platform remains active and is positioning its data as a lens on where the AI industry is headed.
