Charlie Kerr just pulled off the kind of exit that makes every SaaS founder weep into their Series B pitch deck. After spending 27 years building a private markets intelligence empire—first as the decidedly unglamorous “Pageant Media,” then rebranded to the boardroom-ready “With Intelligence”—he’s selling to S&P Global for $1.8 billion. The timing? Impeccable. The payout for investors who backed him? Substantial. The question everyone’s whispering over their third espresso martini at the Core Club? Whether S&P just bought a goldmine or a ticking time bomb.
S&P Global announced Tuesday it’s acquiring With Intelligence (née Pageant Media, for those keeping score at home) from a consortium led by Motive Partners, the fintech-obsessed private equity shop that’s made a career out of making financial services companies sound sexier than they actually are. Motive Partners also owns Santa Monica investment consultant Wilshire Associates and Dun & Bradstreet. Intermediate Capital Group (ICG), which has been along for the With Intelligence ride since 2020 and doubled down in July 2023 alongside Motive’s initial investment, is presumably also celebrating this week.
The deal comes just months after Larry Fink’s BlackRock, because of course, snapped up Preqin, another private markets data player, in a move that signaled the asset management behemoth’s appetite for intelligence on where the real money is going these days. The private markets data gold rush is officially on, darling, and everyone wants a seat at the table.
Founded by Kerr back in 1998, when Yahoo! was still cool and private equity was just beginning its decades-long march toward eating the world. The company has spent nearly three decades collecting the kind of gossip that matters to people who wear Patagonia vests and debate IRR over overpriced salads. Along the way, Pageant Media quietly assembled an empire through strategic acquisitions, playing the consolidation game with surgical precision. There was Hedge Fund Alert from Green Street, because apparently even hedge fund gossip has become a premium product. Then came the 2016 shopping spree at Euromoney Institutional Investor, where Kerr scooped up iiSearches (promptly rebranded to the infinitely more palatable FundMap for tracking mandates), Foundation & Endowment Intelligence, and Money Management Intelligence. Because why build when you can buy?
With Intelligence’s proprietary databases now track approximately 30,000 investors, 30,000 managers, 70,000 funds, and 350,000 deals. Translation: they know who’s investing in what, who’s raising money from whom, and which family offices are quietly writing nine-figure checks while the rest of us clip coupons.
The company serves roughly 3,000 clients; Limited Partners, General Partners, and the advisors who whisper in their ears – across private equity, private credit, hedge funds, real estate, infrastructure, and family offices. In other words, everyone with enough zeros in their bank account to worry about alpha and beta.
ALPHABET PRODUCT SOUP OR A WIN?
“Private markets is one of the most dynamic and fast-growing areas of global finance,” declared Martina Cheung, S&P Global’s President and CEO, deploying the kind of corporate-speak that gets investment bankers positively giddy. She’s not wrong, though. With alternative assets expected to balloon to $40 trillion by 2030, someone needs to keep tabs on where all that money is going. Might as well be S&P Global, especially after watching BlackRock make its own play for the sector. But here’s where things get interesting: Can S&P actually capitalize on this $1.8 billion bet? The company’s track record includes MMD (Money Market Directory), an orphaned product that still looks like it wandered out of a 2003 web design tutorial, think giant green book energy, digitized but never quite modernized. And that’s before we get to the elephant in the Bloomberg Terminal-filled room: institutional salespeople are already drowning in logins. Our conversations with fund managers revealed a dirty little secret; many barely crack open these intelligence platforms to hunt for deal flow or contact information. They’re too busy actually, you know, making deals or complain about stale data (bounced emails).
Enter Octum AI, the startup that’s making the data establishment decidedly nervous. While legacy players like With Intelligence have tried to channel moats around historical databases, Octum is taking a different approach: using its core database and AI to aggregate, synthesize, and surface insights without requiring users to learn yet another clunky interface or remember yet another password. For fund managers who can barely find time to open their existing subscriptions, an AI that does the hunting for them isn’t just convenient, it’s existential competition.
The renewal question looms large. If your users aren’t logging in, are they really going to renew when budget season rolls around? S&P Global just dropped $1.8 billion betting they will. Time will tell if With Intelligence’s “proprietary data” proves sticky enough, or if a new generation of AI-powered platforms renders the old login-and-search model as obsolete as that green MMD book gathering dust in someone’s office.
VINDICATION FOR KERR
For Kerr, who’s spent nearly three decades building his intelligence empire brick by brick, or rather, newsletter by newsletter, the deal represents vindication and presumably a rather substantial addition to his own portfolio. “This is testament to the hard work of our fantastic team,” he said, with the kind of British understatement that only works when you’re about to bank a ten-figure exit.
Rob Heyvaert, Motive Partners’ founder and managing partner, was perhaps more candid about what they’ve actually accomplished since coming aboard in 2023: “We transformed a high-quality information services business into a true data and analytics company with real scarcity value.” Or, in plain English: we made it worth $1.8 billion. ICG, which stuck around for the transformation, clearly saw the writing on the wall when they reinvested alongside Motive last July.
The transaction, expected to close by early 2026 (pending the usual regulatory theater), will create what S&P Global is calling “one of the most comprehensive providers of private markets intelligence.” Whether that’s actually true or just premium-grade marketing copy remains to be seen. But with $130 million in expected 2025 revenue and contract value growing in the high teens, someone clearly thinks Kerr and his team are onto something.
As for what happens to the With Intelligence brand post-acquisition? Don’t be surprised if it eventually gets absorbed into the S&P Global ecosystem, where all good acquired companies go to have their names turned into alphabet soup. But for now, Kerr and his team get to bask in the glow of a very successful rebrand, and an even more successful exit. Not bad for a company that started as Pageant Media and once trafficked in hedge fund industry newsletters. Maybe there’s hope for the rest of us yet.
