Every industry has its gossip columnists, and the gilded, secretive world of alternative assets has With Intelligence. The company began life in 1998 as Pageant Media, a financial media publisher founded by Charlie Kerr a decade after he left Stowe, the Buckinghamshire boarding school that has long turned out England’s more enterprising sons. Kerr’s wager was simple: the managers and allocators moving the world’s hedge fund, private equity, real estate and mutual fund money would pay handsomely to know what their peers were doing before everyone else did. The company initially focused on news and events, but pivoted to alternative investment data. Growth came the old-fashioned way, through acquisition: in 2004, Pageant Media opened its New York office and in 2011 they acquired “Wall Street Letter”. In 2015 they bought Property Investor Europe (PIE). Pageant acquired iiSearches, an investor database from Euromoney Institutional Investor (known as II) that was soon rebranded to Fundmap. That deal also included a number of investor newsletters that were run by II. In 2017, Pageant bought HedgeFund Intelligence from Euromoney Institutional Investor, a pleasing bit of symmetry, since that title had also been born in 1998, in journalist Iain Jenkins’s West London home, and in 2021 it added Green Street’s Hedge Fund Alert to a stable that already included HFM, Eurekahedge, and Pension Bridge (a U.S. pension fund conference series).
In February 2020, Intermediate Capital Group (ICG) took majority control of Pageant Media for a reported £106.5 million in a deal which is believed to have valued the company at £145 million. It was the first investment by ICG’s Europe Mid-Market Fund, which closed in late 2019 at €1 billion raise. The real transformation arrived in 2023, when Motive Partners, a private investment firm devoted to financial and tech-enabled services, took a majority stake alongside reinvestment from management and ICG. Rebranded as With Intelligence and refocused on data and analytics for private markets, the business grew to serve some 3,000 customers worldwide, with revenue expected to reach around $130 million in 2025 and annual contract value climbing in the high teens. That trajectory caught the eye of the grandest name in financial data: on November 25, 2025, S&P Global completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of the company, a rather handsome ending for an enterprise that started out selling hedge fund chatter to the people who make it.
