The LSE Directory / Fintech founders
Jaakko "Jack" Kokko is a Finnish-American entrepreneur who founded AlphaSense in 2011 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. He conceived the company after spending years as an investment banker manually keyword-searching thousands of PDFs, and partnered with Wharton MBA classmate Raj Neervannan, who became co-founder and CTO, to build a machine learning and natural language processing based search engine for market intelligence. Before AlphaSense, Kokko began his career as an analyst on Morgan Stanley's technology M&A and telecom teams, and was founding CEO of Silecs, a semiconductor materials company, and founding chairman of the doctor-search company BetterDoctor. Under his leadership AlphaSense has grown into a market intelligence platform valued at roughly $4 billion (2024 Series F) serving thousands of corporate customers including most of the S&P 100, and in 2023 he was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in New York.
