In 2002 Mark O’Hare filed a public information request with the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, seeking information on the performance of its private equity investments.
The state retirement fund initially fought the British entrepreneur’s move, arguing the data was a trade secret, but a state official sided with O’Hare, helping him overcome an early hurdle in his plan to build a business selling prized information about the secretive buyout sector.
The 65-year-old crystallised that bet on Monday with an agreement to sell his company, Preqin, to asset management group BlackRock in a £2.55bn cash deal that will catapult him into the ranks of Britain’s richest people.
“It’s a fantastic outcome for a great entrepreneur,” said Anand Sanwal, the co-founder of financial data provider CB Insights. “It’s an overnight success 22 years in the making.”
Preqin has grown into a crucial data provider to thousands of customers across investment and advisory groups, giving them access to information tracking performance, fundraising, deals and terms for asset classes including private equity and venture capital.
Its rise has mirrored the growth of private equity over the past two decades into a multitrillion-dollar market as buyout firms such as Blackstone and KKR became giants that dominate dealmaking and are a staple of institutional investors’ portfolios.
Financial data companies have become prized assets as investors seek more and more information to make decisions. S&P Global bought data research company Visible Alpha this year, while the London Stock Exchange Group spent $27bn on acquiring data provider Refinitiv in 2019.
Others to have traded hands in big-money deals in recent years include Reorg and Leveraged Commentary and Data, while London-based energy and commodity data provider Argus Media was valued at $4.6bn including debt in a January deal in which its chief executive took a majority stake.
Growth has been particularly strong in the market for understanding private investments, especially more recently as tepid activity on stock markets has led companies to stay in private hands for longer.
“There is a whole load of interest in private markets . . . and there are not that many data assets out there at scale” said Hiten Patel, global head of financial infrastructure, technology and services at Oliver Wyman. “There’s a scarcity value of assets in the space as a whole.”
Preqin has faced competition along the way from the likes of CB Insights as well as PitchBook, which research group Morningstar bought in a 2016 deal that valued the company at $225mn.
BlackRock paid 13 times Preqin’s expected 2024 revenues of $240mn. When PitchBook was acquired, the deal valued the company at closer to seven times its trailing annual revenues, although it has since become the largest contributor to Morningstar’s growth, with revenues rising about 23 per cent last year to $552mn.
Users of Preqin say it stands out for the depth of information it offers on private market fundraising and returns.
“You have to pay a strategic premium for quality assets,” said Patel. “Particularly assets that have scarcity value.”
BlackRock’s acquisition of Preqin, which has not previously taken outside investment, will make O’Hare and his wife, Lindy, billionaires based on their 80 per cent ownership of the company through their investment vehicle Valhalla Ventures, which is UK-domiciled for tax purposes but owned by a Jersey parent.
The remainder is owned by several hundred of the company’s 1,500 employees, who stand to share roughly £500mn from the sale.
O’Hare, an occasional pilot who survived a 1999 plane crash in his seven-seater aircraft, has run the business as a family affair. He handed over the running of the business to his son-in-law Christoph Knaack when he stepped down as chief executive in 2022. Lindy O’Hare is still a Preqin director.
The lack of outside investors in Preqin has afforded O’Hare, who declined to be interviewed, greater flexibility in how he runs the business.
He and his wife took a £2.3mn loan from Preqin to help fund their £2.8mn purchase of a Suffolk farm in 2018. While the loan from Preqin — which carries a 3 per cent annual interest rate and is secured on the farm — was scheduled to mature last year, UK corporate filings suggest it is not yet fully repaid.
Valhalla Ventures funds the nearby outdoor Thorington Theatre, which the O’Hares had built in a second world war bomb crater with timber from their own chestnut trees.
Preqin was sold in a competitive auction run by Goldman Sachs bankers that drew interest from S&P Global and Bloomberg as its price climbed past initial estimates. It is chaired by Sir Bradley Fried, who was also chair of Goldman Sachs International until April.
New York-based BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, expects the Preqin deal to extend its reach into private markets, which it estimates will reach nearly $40tn in assets by the end of the decade.
The $10.5tn money manager wants to create indices, and eventually offer tracking funds for private equity and other alternatives, expanding the reach of its iShares arm beyond equities and bonds.
“We believe we could index the private markets,” BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink told analysts on Monday. “We anticipate indexes and data will be important future drivers of the democratisation of all alternatives, and this acquisition is the unlock.”
Yet the deal comes as private equity executives warn they face years of lower returns after a decade of easier gains.
O’Hare will become a vice-chair of BlackRock, a role with outward-facing responsibilities for clients and customers. He previously served as a director of a BlackRock fund from 2011 to 2014, and BlackRock has been a data customer of Preqin’s since 2016.
Before founding Preqin, O’Hare in 1993 launched equity shareholder information service Citywatch, which he sold five years later to Reuters. That came alongside an early stint as a manager at the Boston Consulting Group.
O’Hare spotted a rising industry serving up financial data. And he built early inroads, particularly in Europe, with the family offices and institutional investors that put money into private equity funds.
“Mark is a guy who is well liked in the industry,” said one person familiar with the financial data market, adding that O’Hare saw himself as someone who was “going to be a partner to the industry and come up alongside it”.
Some industry executives have questioned whether private fund managers will continue to work with Preqin given BlackRock manages nearly $250bn of alternative funds of its own. The Preqin acquisition comes after the asset manager bolstered its private market offering with a $12.5bn deal to buy the investment group Global Infrastructure Partners.
But BlackRock chief operating officer Rob Goldstein told analysts “we’re actually quite confident in the ability to actually grow” Preqin’s reach because BlackRock’s technology arm already worked directly with many fund managers who trusted it to safeguard their data.
“This deal makes strategic sense,” Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Bedell wrote in a note to clients, adding that combining Preqin’s data with BlackRock’s existing risk management technology should expand the market for both.
Additional reporting by Euan Healy and Will Louch