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Headline lessons
AlphaSense started with a founder who had real proximity to the first buyer persona. Jaakko had worked in investment banking, so the early customer world was familiar. That gave them an access advantage. He could intuitively understand what the market lacked, speak the language of finance users and understand what they cared about without needing translation, which made early conversations and trust easier to earn.
The founding ambition was not to build a niche tool loved by a narrow segment. They approached the company as a bet on something broader the market did not fully agree with yet, and that framing pushed them to aim for scale from the start. It shaped how they evaluated progress. The question was never just “can we sell it,” but whether the thing could grow into something truly large.
As the company grew, maintaining that ambition became part of the job. Jaakko describes the default direction of organizations as slowing down, and ties sustained speed to founders continuing to raise the bar. In practice, tempo was treated as something you protect deliberately, not something that stays high automatically after the early hustle phase.
They started in a part of the market that needed innovation but wasn’t trendy. Their first wedge was buy-side finance users, and early fundraising was harder because this wasn’t an area investors were excited about at the time. That constraint pushed them to prove the opportunity through customers and market adoption.
The bet was never to build “a hedge fund tool.” Hedge funds were simply the fastest place to get tight feedback loops on a hard product problem: turning a sea of messy, public-market documents into something you can search and rely on to make faster investment decisions. What AlphaSense was building from day one was a finance-grade semantic discovery layer over filings, transcripts, and research, so professionals could find the right passages and supporting evidence fast. In essence, it was ctrl+F across the entire market, but with meaning, not just keywords. Once that worked in the most demanding client segment, the same engine could expand naturally into corporates and other knowledge teams making big decisions off the same information.
In the earliest phase, they validated the product by taking the idea, turning it into something that looked real on slides, and started showing it to potential users as if it already existed. The test was simple: would anyone buy this, and what would they expect it to do for the money?
They treated those conversations as their R&D loop. Instead of trying to “protect the idea,” they invited rejection on purpose. Getting a hard no, or even someone who totally hated the pitch, was useful because it exposed what was wrong or unclear. The process came with potential for embarrassment, but it kept them close to ground truth and stopped them from building in the dark.
This mattered because early-stage failure rarely comes from lack of effort. It comes from believing in your own story too single-mindedly. Their approach forced reality into the product definition before it would become expensive to change direction, before hiring of a sales team or raising institutional capital for scaling.
Once there was something users could try, they went after a wedge where the feedback would be fast and honest. Hedge funds were a good proving ground because they had budgets and quick decision cycles. If the product delivered clear value, they could buy quickly. If it did not, they would say so, and move on just as quickly. That forced the early product to stand on its own.
Trust was also easier to earn because the first use case was built on public information. They could offer trials and let the experience do the convincing, without asking customers to upload sensitive internal data into a young company’s system. That mattered because the trust hurdle in B2B is often about what you are asking customers to hand over, not just what you promise to deliver.
Even with that advantage, they treated credibility as something you build deliberately. They focused on the perception layer that makes buyers take you seriously: polished slides and strong UI/UX. Looking sloppy was viewed as an unforced error, especially when you are still small and the buyer is deciding whether you are real.