Preqin

Preqin is a financial-data company, founded in 2003 and based in London, that provides data, research, and insight on the alternative-assets market. It was launched as Private Equity Intelligence by Mark O'Hare and grew into a broad provider of information covering alternative assets — investments outside the traditional public stock and bond markets, such as private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, private debt, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources. Critically, Preqin is not an investment firm: it does not invest capital or manage funds. Instead it sells the data and intelligence that investors, fund managers, and other market participants use to understand the private-markets industry — information on funds, fund managers, investors, deals, and performance. In 2024 Preqin agreed to be acquired by the asset manager BlackRock, a deal that completed in 2025. This entry sets out the company factually as general information, not financial or investment advice.

Preqin matters because data is the connective tissue of the alternative-assets industry, and Preqin is one of the leading providers of it. Private markets are, by nature, less transparent than public stock exchanges — there is no continuous public ticker for a private-equity fund — so investors and managers rely on specialized data providers to see the landscape: who is raising funds, how funds have performed, which investors are active, what deals are happening. Preqin built its business supplying exactly this intelligence, which is why it sits at a different point in the ecosystem from the firms it covers. For someone encountering the name, the key fact is that Preqin is the information layer, not a participant placing bets. We avoid quoting figures about its coverage or scale here, since those change and the company's own materials are the authoritative current source.

Preqin is fundamentally different from the investment firms in this same area, and that difference is the most important thing to understand about it. Firms such as TPG, EQT, and Accel invest capital — they raise money and put it into companies, aiming for returns. Preqin does none of that. It is a data and intelligence provider that sells information about those firms and the broader private-markets industry. Where a private-equity or venture-capital firm makes money from successful investments, Preqin makes money from selling data and research to the people who do the investing. So Preqin sits beside the market it serves rather than inside it as a player, which is exactly why analysts and investors turn to it for an independent view of who is doing what across alternative assets.

This positioning shapes what Preqin is known for. Its identity is defined by its founding in 2003 as Private Equity Intelligence, its London base, its expansion from private-equity data into the wider alternative-assets universe, and its role as a go-to source of private-markets intelligence — culminating in its acquisition by BlackRock, completed in 2025. Beyond these durable facts, any figure describing the breadth of its database or its commercial scale should be taken from the company's own current sources, because such numbers grow and change. The honest framing is to give the lasting facts about what Preqin is and the function it serves, and to direct readers to authoritative sources for live figures rather than repeat statistics that may already be outdated. This material is informational only and is not investment advice.

Reading an entry on Preqin soundly means taking its durable identity — a London-based alternative-assets data and intelligence company founded in 2003, acquired by BlackRock in 2025 — and remembering above all that it is a data provider, not an investor. The stable facts orient you: when Preqin is cited as the source of a private-markets figure, you know it is the industry's information layer rather than a firm placing capital. Any number about the size of its database or its business belongs to the company's current sources, because such figures change. Used this way, the entry tells you what role Preqin plays in the ecosystem so you can read its data in context. This is general information meant to orient, not financial or investment advice.

The pitfalls are confusing Preqin with the firms it covers — treating a data provider as if it were an investor like TPG, EQT, or Accel — and relying on any quoted coverage or scale figure as current. Preqin's whole significance is that it stands apart from the investing firms, supplying the information they and others use, so collapsing it into the same category misses the point. Its database statistics also grow over time, so repeating them uncritically misleads. The discipline is to anchor on the durable fact that Preqin is the private-markets data layer, source any figures fresh from the company, and keep it distinct from the investment firms. An entry like this informs and orients; it makes no recommendation and gives no advice. For more, the company's own materials are the authority.

Preqin — a London-based alternative-assets data company founded in 2003 and acquired by BlackRock in 2025 — supplies private-markets data and insight rather than investing, and this entry is general information, not investment advice.

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