Estimize Receives $3.6 Million Strategic Investment From Euromoney

Estimize has roughly doubled the value of its Series B after Euromoney acquired a 10 percent stake in Estimize for $3.6 million. "The media is an incredibly important part of making Estimize the dataset," Leigh Drogen, founder and CEO of Estimize, told Benzinga. "They have an incredibly strong media brand. When they approached us and they started to talk to us about all their different properties, it became obvious that there was gonna be some significant tie-up there. I think they understand that financial data is really the future of the industry." Drogen said that Estimize "represented a direction" that Euromoney "wanted to move in." "I think, for us, we see our research as an incredible platform," Drogen continued. "They are the largest macroeconomic research platform in the world. They have basically every macroeconomic asset manager -- anybody that pays attention to any of that is a client of theirs."

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International Growth

Drogen said that Euromoney provides "an incredible opportunity for us to partner with them on both the supply and demand side." "People are using our data, people are contributing to the dataset," he said. "It's probably the best macroeconomic partnership we'll ever get to do. When these things came up and I went out to visit them in London [last spring], it became very obvious that they were a pretty forward-thinking company. I was surprised." Investors may not expect an older company to be agile and aggressive. That made Euromoney all the more impressive to Drogen. "Our philosophy is scary to a lot of people," he added. "It's crowdsourcing from an open community. It takes some deep understanding of the statistics and philosophy to really trust everything and wrap your head around it. And immediately [Euromoney was] like, 'Yeah, we totally get it.'" Euromoney went the extra mile and showed Drogen some of its own crowdsourced projects. "They have this incredible business line where, for the last four years, they've been crowdsourcing things from economists and other people the likelihood of default for sovereign debt across a slew of different countries," said Drogen. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.