AlphaSense, a business intelligence platform, has acquired Carousel, a startup that provides a digital assistant for automating spreadsheet modeling in Microsoft Excel. Carousel was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Jack Kokko, CEO of AlphaSense, confirmed the company recently reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue and serves roughly 6,500 corporate clients worldwide.
AlphaSense was founded in 2011 and is valued at $4 billion according to PitchBook. The acquisition adds to the company’s suite of tools designed to support analysts and corporate operations.
What Carousel Brings to the Table
Carousel, founded in 2023 by Daniel Wolf and Jude Rizzo, provides software that automates several common tasks in spreadsheet modeling. It extracts data from PDFs and presentations, generates formulas, formats models, and provides explanations of model logic. These functions reduce the time analysts spend on manual spreadsheet work and support consistent workflows across financial models.
AlphaSense plans to integrate Carousel’s technology and team into its platform so that analysts can access these tools directly within Excel. “This acquisition extends and accelerates our efforts to automate financial workflows with Generative AI, uniquely combining Canalyst’s one-of-a-kind data asset with Carousel’s AI-driven modeling tool,” Kokko said.
“By incorporating what the Carousel team has built, we extend that leadership into Excel, streamlining one of the most important analytical workflows in the financial and business world.”
Supporting Analysts in Everyday Work
The acquisition follows AlphaSense’s 2024 purchase of Tegus for $930 million, which expanded the company’s tools for financial services research and workflow management. Carousel’s features are particularly relevant for junior and mid-level analysts, who perform much of the spreadsheet modeling. By automating repetitive or detailed tasks, analysts can complete models more efficiently while retaining oversight of complex calculations.
Daniel Wolf, Co-Founder of Carousel, noted the potential of the integration: “Carousel takes care of tedious Excel work, but together with AlphaSense, we can now build toward a bigger opportunity. By pairing our modeling velocity with AlphaSense’s intelligence capabilities, millions of documents, and thousands of Canalyst models, we can help analysts iterate with market insights and pursue deeper analysis they wouldn’t have time for otherwise. We can make analysts better, not just faster.”
Excel continues to be one of the most widely used tools for financial analysis and corporate modeling. With Carousel integrated, analysts can perform tasks such as data extraction, formula creation, model formatting, and logic explanation directly within Excel. These features are now part of AlphaSense’s platform alongside research aggregation, analytics, and workflow management tools.
Expanding the Platform with Specialized Expertise
Since its founding in 2011, AlphaSense has grown its client base to thousands of corporations worldwide. The platform has evolved from research aggregation to include document search, data analytics, and workflow management. Carousel adds specialized capabilities for spreadsheet modeling and prepares analysts to handle data-intensive tasks.
The integration brings Carousel’s team into AlphaSense, adding experience in spreadsheet operations and automation. Analysts can access the expanded platform while maintaining familiar processes, using the new tools alongside existing resources for research and analysis.
The acquisition of Carousel gives AlphaSense additional technology and personnel focused on spreadsheet modeling tasks. Analysts can use the integrated features directly within Excel to automate routine work, while retaining oversight and control over models.
The platform now combines research, analytics, and modeling support, enhancing operational efficiency without changing the scope of existing services.
