PitchBook has had impressive organic growth. Can you give some insight into what is driving the growth?

March 18, 2019

In 2018, PitchBook revenues increased 56.6% to $99.6 million, driven primarily by growth in the number of licenses at both new and existing customers. PitchBook is now our fourth largest product line and generated close to 10% of our consolidated revenue last year.  

We have been successful in driving growth from new and existing customers by delivering incremental value through the PitchBook Platform. Our focus on the quality of our data and rigorous research process, continued product innovation, and our sales and marketing process are all important contributors.

Our efforts in 2018 are a great example of how we enhanced our value proposition. We delivered more than 300 upgrade releases through the PitchBook platform, making it easier and faster to derive meaningful insights into the evolving capital markets. We also focused on expanding datasets, adding coverage of over 320,000 new private middle market companies and substantially increasing the number of financial statements available for more than 70,000 European private companies already covered. Additionally, we further expanded the suite of fundamental equity data on the PitchBook platform to provide comprehensive public-company data alongside PitchBook’s private market data.

Pricing is based on the number of seats that a customer licenses, and we generally charge annual license fees per user. We also offer more customized pricing for large enterprises, boutiques, and start-up firms. PitchBook’s main competitors include CB Insights, Dow Jones VentureSource, Prequin, S&P Capital IQ, and Thomson Reuters. As we have referenced before, we believe the addressable market is close to $1.8 billion which would imply a current market share of close to 6%.

We are extremely pleased with Pitchbook’s financial performance and how the business has tracked relative to our expectations since the acquisition. We’ve stated in the past that PitchBook’s margin profile is lower than our corporate average, but robust revenue growth and recent success at sharing corporate resources have contributed to some more recent margin improvement.  Over time, we believe PitchBook will reach a similar operating margin profile as the rest of Morningstar.

Media Relations Contact

Media Hotline +1 312 696-6037
newsroom@morningstar.com

Resources

Legal Notices Privacy Policy Regulatory Disclosures Global Contacts