Jaakko Kokko

Founder and Chief Executive Officer AlphaSense

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jaakko “Jack” Kokko is the founder and chief executive of AlphaSense, the New York company that built a search engine for business information and has spent fifteen years turning it into a market intelligence platform used by most of the Fortune 500 and nearly every large financial institution. The idea came from an irritation he had personally: as a Morgan Stanley analyst in the late 1990s he spent days pressing CTRL+F through thousands of PDFs, one keyword at a time, never confident he had not missed something. A decade later, with nothing much improved, he and Raj Neervannan built the thing he had wanted. AlphaSense launched in 2011 and reported more than $600 million in annual recurring revenue when it raised $350 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in June 2026.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of AlphaSense since its 2011 launch, one of a small number of software founders still running the company fifteen years on.
• Led the June 2026 round of $350 million at a $7.5 billion valuation — close to double the company’s previous $4 billion mark — bringing total funding to well over $1 billion.
• Surpassed $600 million in annual recurring revenue, reported in the first quarter of 2026.
• Expanded the platform by acquisition, absorbing Tegus, BamSEC, Canalyst and Sentieo.
• Named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New York award winner in 2023.
• Before AlphaSense: founding CEO of Silecs, a semiconductor materials company later acquired by PiBond, and founding Chairman of BetterDoctor, acquired by Quest Analytics.
• Began his career as a senior analyst in technology and telecom M&A at Morgan Stanley, in Menlo Park and London.

Professional Journey

Kokko trained in two directions at once. He took a bachelor’s degree in finance at the Helsinki School of Economics and a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Oulu, then an MBA in finance at Wharton — an unusual combination that shows up later in a company whose product is equal parts information business and search engineering.

His career began at Morgan Stanley, as a senior analyst on the technology M&A team in Menlo Park and the telecom team in London. The company’s own account of its origins turns on that period: an investment banker in the late 1990s, buried in PDFs, working keyword by keyword and worrying about what he had missed. That is a familiar complaint. What distinguishes the story is that he did not act on it immediately. He went first into deep technology, as founding CEO of Silecs, which developed advanced materials for improving semiconductor chip performance and was eventually acquired by PiBond, and he was founding chairman of BetterDoctor, a doctor search engine and data provider to health plans that Quest Analytics acquired.

Only about ten years after the banking job, still frustrated that research had not improved, did he and Raj Neervannan conceive a different kind of search engine — one using machine learning and natural language processing against a curated, centralised library of business information rather than the open web. They launched AlphaSense in 2011.

The company’s growth since has come from two directions that reinforce each other. One is content: AlphaSense has bought its way to a research corpus, acquiring Tegus for expert-call interviews, BamSEC for filings, Canalyst for company models and Sentieo for research workflow. The other is the AI layer over it, which the company now frames as its whole proposition — in Kokko’s words at the June 2026 round, moving beyond the search and retrieval of information to end-to-end AI-driven workflows, with a continuously learning platform combining proprietary content, expert insight and purpose-built models. In 2025 AlphaSense partnered with Cerebras Systems for inference speed.

That round is the clearest measure of where the business now sits. The $350 million came from Vitruvian Partners, Accenture Ventures and J.P. Morgan Asset Management as leads, with D.E. Shaw Ventures and Pinegrove Opportunity Partners joining and existing backers CapitalG, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Viking Global Investors participating. It valued the company at $7.5 billion, nearly double its previous $4 billion, and took total funding past $1 billion. AlphaSense says it serves a majority of Fortune 500 companies and nearly all of the world’s largest financial institutions.

He runs the company from its headquarters in Hudson Yards, New York, where he lives with his family. Neervannan remains Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, so both founders are still in place — which is rarer than it sounds at this stage and this valuation.

Education

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

MBA, Finance

University of Oulu

Master’s degree, Electrical Engineering

Helsinki School of Economics

Bachelor’s degree, Finance