In the early months of Francisco Partners, Samantha Greenberg sat in a room on folding chairs with the firm’s cofounders and one other colleague, planning the business.
According to Greenberg, the private equity firm was pursuing an idea that many considered impossible in the late 1990s: executing leveraged buyouts of technology companies. Greenberg tells us she was drawn to the vision because it challenged the belief that technology businesses could not be predictable or capitalized with debt.
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During the firm’s first year, Greenberg says, the team closed its first fund. She helped build operating processes, worked on the first transactions, and participated in fundraising—experiences that she says made her a better operator years later.
That builder’s instinct eventually pulled Greenberg away from investing. After 18 years as a technology investor, she had come to appreciate the discipline of “separating signal from noise,” surfacing insights, and allocating capital. But Greenberg tells us that running her own hedge fund revealed something more personal: She found operating more engaging than investing because it gave her “a seat at delivering the value creation.”
She became a CFO in 2021 and deliberately chose an earlier-stage company instead of a more mature organization. According to Greenberg, the decision allowed her to develop the skills she lacked—leading finance transformation, implementing systems, driving operational maturity, and running an accounting department.
The transition also challenged an investing instinct. Investors can wait for the “fat pitches,” Greenberg explains, but rapidly scaling companies cannot wait for every decision to be perfect. Her operating lesson is more immediate: “Velocity matters too.”
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CFOTL: You joined AlphaSense in early spring. Tell us about the company, the opportunity you saw, and what AlphaSense is about today.
Greenberg: Thank you for asking that. My journey and the origin story of how I came to be at AlphaSense is a funny one. AlphaSense is an AI market intelligence platform. We automate the entire research process for knowledge workers, and we’re quite scaled. We serve over 7,800 customers, including 75% of the S&P 500, and it’s a global business with thousands of employees.
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We’re a vertically integrated research platform. That means we solve the full end-to-end stack of research automation in one place. We’ve indexed all the world’s valuable business content, whether that’s expert interviews, sell-side research reports, or financial and market data. We’ve built a context graph on top of all that intelligence, as well as an AI orchestration layer, AI tools that perform reasoning and synthesis, and workflow agents that agentically perform entire research workflows in one click.
Because we own the entire stack, we’re able to optimize the system so that the AI harness, the tools for the LLM to call, the context graph, and the data it’s reasoning over all work seamlessly together. That makes knowledge and research projects far smarter and more token-efficient.
With respect to how I came to AlphaSense, I was happily in my fourth year at a high-growth cybersecurity business. AlphaSense is used by 75% of the S&P 500, but it’s also used by hundreds of thousands of private companies. At my former company, ID.me, our finance organization was using AlphaSense day in and day out for every research workstream—from investor relations and FP&A market-sizing projects to competitive intelligence, strategy, and benchmarking projects. Research projects that used to take a finance team days were taking us 30 to 60 minutes on AlphaSense.
When they contacted me, I was convinced they had gone onto their platform and simply said, “Show us all the CFOs who are power users of AlphaSense.” The truth is, they found me through a recruiter—the classic way. But when they reached out, I told them I was a power user who used AlphaSense day in and day out. I truly loved the product.
For me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a company with such an exciting runway ahead, so much business momentum, and so much product innovation—but also one where I truly love the product and use it day in and day out. There’s this famous concept in venture capital about jaw-dropping customer experiences, like how you felt the first time you used an iPhone or rode in an Uber. For a finance professional and finance officer, that’s what using AlphaSense is like. I’m incredibly grateful and excited to be here.
CFOTL: There was a capital raise in the not-too-distant past. How are you assessing AlphaSense’s capital position today?
Greenberg: A couple of months ago, we announced a $350 million fundraise. It nearly doubled our last round’s valuation. We also announced that, back in Q1, we had surpassed $600 million of ARR, growing more than 40% year over year. We’re so pleased that our business momentum and product innovation were recognized by top-tier institutional investors.
That fundraise leaves us extremely well capitalized. But I should note that we’re investing aggressively for growth and to win the market, yet at the same time we’re scaling efficiently. If you look at measures of efficient scaling, like magic number or burn ratio, we are top quartile or top decile on those metrics.
That’s where it’s so important: If you want to deliver value for shareholders, you have to know how to invest your resources. But you can’t hesitate when you have these great opportunities to drive innovation, accelerate your product and engineering roadmap, expand your go-to-market, and expand internationally. You have to make analytical, rigorous decisions around deploying those resources because that’s how you deliver value for shareholders.
AlphaSense | www.alphasense.com | New York, NY