PitchBook, a Seattle-based financial data provider, tracks and analyzes information on millions of companies worldwide — from household names to startups just opening their doors. Investors rely heavily on PitchBook's comprehensive data, paying a premium for its insights into private equity, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions.
It’s a large volume of data to keep up with, as company details are constantly in flux: executives change, employee headcounts shift, and new businesses emerge — some in stealth mode. PitchBook’s clients send the company research requests every day, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. A request could be as complex as asking the company to start tracking a startup or something as simple as a minor issue with the company’s website.
To support its ongoing efforts to better handle these requests, PitchBook recently partnered with a team of graduate students from the University of Washington Information School as part of their Capstone project, the culmination of their studies at the school.
The team — (pictured, from left) Geethu Devarajan, Rome Lin, Ivy Chen and Jason Sun — worked on the project during their second year as students in the Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) program. They were introduced to PitchBook, a frequent Capstone sponsor and longtime iEngage partner, during the iSchool’s Capstone Night last November.
The team first looked at ways to further optimize how researchers handle user-submitted update requests. Processing times span a wide range, depending on the complexity of each ticket.
“Each ticket must be reviewed to determine the nature of the request and routed accordingly. Some highlight missing information, while others seek clarifications.” Devarajan said.
PitchBook provided the team with access to several fiscal quarters of historical ticket data. To streamline classification, the students utilized generative AI to categorize tickets into 11 main types. Early testing on a sample set achieved a 92% accuracy rate.
“Generative AI is still new in many enterprise environments,” Sun noted. “Many teams are figuring out how to adopt it in ways that are secure and practical.
The second part of the project involved creating a dashboard to track business impact and manage data-collection incidents. PitchBook is constantly refining how it collects information, automatically combing through data sources such as news articles and regulatory filings to isolate and extract relevant information. The company wanted a dashboard that could forecast how tweaks to this system would impact the larger data collection infrastructure.
“If they make an update to how they collect information, they want to understand what effect that has on the business,” Devarajan explained.
The students held regular meetings with PitchBook’s Seattle and New York teams and even coordinated early morning sessions with researchers based in Mumbai.
The results have been great so far, said Justin Brite, PitchBook’s lead product manager. “They're not just writing a report, that's like a business case or a research study,” Brite said. “They're actually doing development work that we plan to utilize.”
Each team member joined the iSchool to gain hands-on experience and connect with leading companies like PitchBook. But they also had personal reasons. Sun, who hopes to pursue a Ph.D., was drawn to iSchool faculty such as Aylin Caliskan and Mike Teodorescu. Devarajan chose the UW for its proximity to Seattle’s thriving tech industry as she seeks to advance her career in data and product management.
Chen said, “I love the campus here. The cherry blossoms in spring are a major highlight.”
Lin, who earned his undergraduate business degree from the UW in 2021, worked as an industrial engineer at Micron in Taiwan and has interned as a data engineer. He’s especially interested in applying his technical and analytical skills to the tech industry.
“I’ve really enjoyed the collaborative nature of our Capstone project,” Lin said. “Everyone brought unique skills to the table. This experience has helped me grow technically and professionally, and I look forward to using those skills in my next opportunity after graduation.”