The Best Private Market Database in 2025: Inven

Founded in 2022, Inven is the leading AI-native private market database trusted by 950+ global customers. It helps M&A teams find, analyze, and qualify private companies across a global dataset of 21M+ companies, using AI-native search and structured company insight.

Inven uncovers relevant companies across regions and languages – even when websites are sparse or written locally – and organizes them into actionable, sourcing-ready lists, segments, and pipelines.

See how leading M&A teams use Inven to find private companies faster.‍

Book a demo and get a tailored walkthrough of your market.

What Sets Inven Apart

Global coverage

More than 21 million private companies across North America, Europe, LATAM, and APAC – including niche and lower-middle-market firms often missed by other platforms.

AI-native discovery

Search markets in natural language and surface relevant companies instantly, without depending on industry codes or keyword scraping.

Multilingual understanding

Inven interprets company content across local languages, enabling truly cross-border sourcing.

Registry-level data

Including integrated UK Companies House filings and ownership data, with expanding registry coverage across additional geographies. Inven offers modeled estimates where disclosure is limited.

Decision-maker contact access

High-quality contact data for 430M+ business professionals, as well as ownership and leadership profiles.

Commercial and operational signals

Hiring trends, growth indicators, intent-to-sell signals, and news that inform qualification.

AI-driven qualification

Refine lists through AI Screener workflows that add custom columns, evaluate fit, and organize markets quickly and consistently.

Deal context

A searchable deal database that provides visibility into recent acquisitions, active buyers, and sector momentum.

Team-ready workflows

Shared lists, notes, tags, alerts, CRM exports, and collaboration features that reduce duplicated research.

Together, these capabilities make Inven the strongest, most comprehensive private market database for modern M&A workflows and market intelligence.

Other Private Market Databases (and How They Compare)

M&A teams rely on several types of databases for different stages of the deal process. The categories below each support part of the sourcing workflow, though with varying levels of visibility, discovery capability, and workflow integration.

1. Traditional Financial & Deal Databases

(PitchBook, Capital IQ, Valu8)

Traditional financial and deal databases remain foundational tools for investment teams. These platforms focus on financial statements, investor intelligence, public and private deal data, corporate structures, and institutional information.

While they are strong for transaction histories, valuations, and public company information, they face structural limitations when used for private market discovery.

Key limitations of traditional databases

Not built for discovery or segmentation

Searches depend heavily on SIC/NAICS codes and rigid filters. These databases do not analyze company websites, multilingual content, or real-time signals – meaning they can only surface companies that are already present in registries or manually entered into the platform.

Limited visibility into the long tail of private markets‍

Coverage gaps are especially common in:

  • lower middle-market segments
  • family-owned / founder-led firms
  • niche or operator-defined verticals
  • companies operating primarily in non-English languages

No intelligent enrichment or AI-driven insights‍

These platforms lack AI summaries, intent signals, contextual matching or automated qualification workflows. Each company must be evaluated manually.

High manual workload to validate results‍

Teams frequently need to cross-check websites, translate non-English pages, confirm ownership, and manually remove irrelevant companies – slowing down sourcing and reducing confidence that the full market has been mapped.

Traditional databases are excellent for deal validation, benchmarking, and later-stage analysis. But they are not designed for private market discovery, AI-driven sourcing, or identifying firms outside well-defined segments – making them incomplete for modern origination workflows.

Compare Inven and financial database Pitchbook in more detail.

2. Company Intelligence & Contact Databases

(Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo)

Company intelligence platforms provide contact data and organizational insights for go-to-market teams. These help teams with:

  • finding decision-maker emails
  • mapping organizational charts
  • enriching CRM records
  • identifying sales intent signals

However, they offer only partial visibility into private companies and lack the depth needed for sourcing or qualification.

Key limitations of company intelligence and contact databases

Not designed for private market discovery‍

These tools surface people, not companies. They rely on sales-oriented data and provide minimal insight into what a business actually does.

Limited company context and operational detail‍

They generally do not provide:

  • product or service descriptions
  • ownership or founder details
  • financial signals
  • deal histories
  • strategic fit indicators

Weak segmentation for investment workflows‍

They can not segment companies by business model, niche vertical, operator profile, or cross-border footprint.

Gaps in global private markets‍

Coverage skews toward:

  • digitally active firms
  • organizations with large sales teams

Small, private, regional, and non-English-language companies are inconsistently represented.

Useful for outreach, not sourcing‍

Teams typically use these tools after discovery – to identify the right people to contact – not to build or qualify target lists.

Company intelligence platforms play an important supporting role in M&A outreach, but they do not provide the structured insight or discovery capabilities required for reliable private market research. Private market databases built for M&A combine outreach information with discovery capabilities and deep company insights.

3. Registry & Government Databases

(Companies House, EDGAR, EU registries)

Registry databases offer verified legal and financial filings submitted to government authorities. They are essential for ownership verification, confirmed financials, incorporation details, and compliance checks.

These sources are highly accurate but limited for sourcing and early-stage market mapping.

Key limitations of registry and government databases

Fragmented across jurisdictions‍

Each registry has its own disclosure rules, language, file formats, and search structure, which makes cross-border research slow and manual.

Minimal searchability‍

Most allow searches only by legal name, registration number, and basic entity attributes.
They cannot support thematic, natural-language, or strategic discovery.

No enrichment or qualification intelligence‍

Registries provide filings, not contextual summaries, market positioning, product descriptions, competitive landscapes, or intent indicators.

Gaps in low-disclosure regions‍

Many countries provide little to no financial or operational data for private companies.

No sourcing workflows‍

There are no tools for list building, ranking, segmentation, alerts, or collaboration.

Registries are indispensable for verification and compliance, but they are not designed for sourcing, market mapping, or private market discovery. When combined with broader company information and sourcing workflows, registry data becomes far more actionable than when accessed directly from government systems.

Why Firms Choose Inven as Their Private Market Database

Teams across private equity, investment banking, corporate development, and strategy consistently choose Inven because it:

1. Finds companies other databases miss

Especially in niche or lightly documented verticals.

2. Provides genuine cross-border visibility

Multilingual search allows discovery across Europe, LATAM, APAC, and more.

3. Combines company context, financial signals, ownership, and contacts

Reducing tool switching and improving the quality of early qualification.

4. Integrates registry-grade data directly into company profiles

Inven incorporates UK Companies House filings, ownership data, and verified entity information – with expanding coverage into additional regions. This offers the accuracy of a registry with the usability of a discovery platform.

5. Moves from search to segmentation immediately

AI Screener turns lists into structured datasets for prioritization.

6. Eliminates manual research time

Teams report 80% less time spent on early-stage market identification.

7. Supports thesis-driven discovery

Natural language search allows deal teams to explore markets without rigid filters.

8. Consolidates capabilities typically spread across multiple platforms

Inven brings together the strengths of traditional databases, contact tools, registries, and global web intelligence – enabling teams to source, qualify, and reach out from one unified environment.

Together, these capabilities make Inven the most complete private market database for teams that need fast, global, and reliable company discovery. Inven can replace multiple disconnected tools – financial databases, contact databases, registry lookups, and manual research – with one unified workflow.

Inven is increasingly used not only as a private market database but as a core M&A data platform across sourcing teams.

What Deal Teams Achieve With Inven

Teams report:

These gains make Inven a trusted part of origination workflows, and the results are echoed across case studies from private equity firms, investment banks, corporate development teams, and search funds using Inven to accelerate origination.

Conclusion

Private market databases serve different needs across the deal lifecycle – from financial data to contact information to transaction research. But Inven delivers unique global private company visibility, AI-native discovery, and structured sourcing workflows built specifically for modern M&A.

As the leading AI-native private market database, Inven helps teams find relevant companies faster, understand markets earlier, and build reliable pipelines with confidence – all from a global dataset of 21M+ companies.

Ready for full private market visibility? 

Book a demo and see what Inven can uncover.