Data sourced from Joe, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
Most transaction databases sell you a headline: a buyer, a seller, a dollar figure pulled from a press release.
They rarely tell you who financed the deal, which bank advised, or which law firm closed it, and that gap shows up right when a deal team, banker, or lender needs the full picture most.
Private market deal activity keeps climbing across PE, VC, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure, and the firms tracking it systematically are outpacing the ones still relying on relationships and word of mouth.
Here's how the leading private company transaction databases compare on coverage, participant depth, and price.
Joe, Powered by Dakota, is a private markets intelligence and performance platform built for institutional investors and investment professionals. It brings together fund performance, custom benchmarking, GP and sponsor intelligence, funds in market, portfolio company data, private company transactions, and market news in one connected platform.
Joe provides performance data for more than 18,000 named funds and vehicles, including Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI for closed-end private market funds. Joe also includes returns for hedge funds, evergreen funds, and semi-liquid alternatives.
Users can evaluate individual fund performance, analyze a manager’s track record across fund vintages, and build custom peer groups by strategy, vintage year, geography, fund size, and other relevant criteria. Joe also enables users to identify funds currently raising capital and evaluate them alongside manager histories, investment strategies, portfolio companies, transaction activity, and allocator relationships.
Every record is reviewed by Joe’s research team, structured consistently, and updated in real time as new information becomes available. Users can search, compare, benchmark, and export data through the Joe platform, with additional access through API, MCP, and AI connectors.
Joe is available for $9,500 per year for up to five users, with transparent pricing and a straightforward purchasing process.
Best for: investment consultants, endowments and foundations, family offices, RIAs, institutional allocators, CIOs, secondaries investors, and GP investor relations teams conducting manager diligence, evaluating named-fund performance, benchmarking track records, and identifying funds currently raising capital.
Request access to Joe, powered by Dakota to see transactions on your own target list.
S&P Capital IQ Pro is the private-markets module inside S&P Global's flagship financial intelligence platform, covering an enormous universe of <cite index="19-1">109,000+ public companies and 58 million+ private companies</cite>. It generates comparable transaction analyses directly inside its Excel plug-in and pulls private company data alongside the public-market financials, ratings, and macro datasets S&P is known for.
The breadth is the appeal and the limitation. Coverage runs across nearly every company on earth, but that scale comes from a research terminal built for many use cases at once, not a team dedicated to verifying transaction participants the way a purpose-built deal database is. <cite index="19-1">Pricing is quote-based, with contracts reported in the range of roughly $14,800 to $215,000 per year and a median around $53,000</cite>.
Best for: Teams that already run their broader financial research through S&P's ecosystem and want M&A comps as one module among many.
PitchBook remains the reference tool for venture capital and private equity research, with a company and investor database in the millions of profiles. It's the platform most analysts open first when researching a fund, a sponsor, or a financing history.
That depth carries a real cost. <cite index="15-1">Contracts range from roughly $20,000 to $124,000 per year with a median around $30,000, and single-user subscriptions typically start at $12,000 to $20,000 annually</cite>, all on a custom quote with no published rate card. PitchBook is strongest on VC and PE deal history; participant-level detail on private credit, real estate, and infrastructure deals is thinner than its equity coverage.
Best for: VC and PE research where fund and sponsor history matters more than full multi-strategy participant mapping.
Mergermarket, now part of ION Analytics, built its reputation on forward-looking intelligence: predictive signals on deals still in the works, editorial coverage of dealmaking trends, and the league tables that have become an industry standard for tracking advisor rankings. Its underlying deal data has been consolidated with Dealogic's since 2023, extending its historical depth.
The tradeoff is that Mergermarket's core strength is anticipating deals before they're announced, not building a fully participant-tagged record of every closed transaction across every private market strategy. Pricing is enterprise-level and quote-only.
Best for: Bankers and advisors who want early signals on deals in motion and league-table positioning, more than a systematic closed-deal archive.
Grata is an AI-powered search engine for private companies, built to help deal teams find founder-led, bootstrapped, and non-sponsored businesses that don't show up in standard industry codes or sponsor databases. Its "Find Similar" feature and contextual search are genuinely useful for early-stage target identification. Grata was acquired by Datasite in 2025 and has since combined forces with SourceScrub to expand its private company data footprint.
Grata is a company discovery tool first, not a transaction database. It's built to help a team find a target, not to tell them who financed the last five deals a sponsor closed or which law firm keeps showing up on a competitor's cap table. Pricing is tiered and custom-quoted, with add-on modules for API and data warehouse access.
Best for: Early-stage target identification in fragmented, founder-owned markets, before a deal, not after one.
How to Choose
- If the job is verifying who was actually involved in a deal, buyer, seller, lender, advisor, and counsel, Dakota Transactions is purpose-built for that.
- If the job is broad financial research where M&A comps are one need among many, a general terminal like S&P Capital IQ Pro may already be in the budget.
- If the job is VC/PE fund and sponsor history specifically, PitchBook's depth there is hard to match.
- If the job is getting ahead of a deal before it's announced, Mergermarket's predictive intelligence is the differentiator.
- If the job is finding acquisition targets that haven't shown up in any database yet, Grata is a sourcing tool, not a transaction record.
See the Full Deal Picture
Dakota Transactions gives deal teams, bankers, and private credit teams the full participant picture, not just the headline, at a fraction of what the enterprise terminals charge. With 70,000+ verified transactions and roughly 6,000 new deals added every month, build a comp set filtered by sector, transaction type, and value, or track which sponsors, lenders, and advisors are most active in your market.
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