Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Fundraising and raising capital is hard. Dakota makes it easier.
A contact's current title tells you where they sit today. It doesn't tell you where they came from, whether they spent years at a firm you already have ties to, or whether their background lines up closely with the strategy you're raising for.
In this article, we'll walk through how Career History in Dakota Marketplace surfaces that employment background directly, and how to use it to find a real hook before you send your next cold email.
What Career History Actually Shows You
Career History surfaces a contact's full employment background, the firms they've worked at and the roles they've held before landing in their current seat, going beyond a static job title to show their actual professional path. Dakota Marketplace has 350,000+ career histories tagged to contacts, with LPL, Edward D. Jones, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch among the most represented firms in the dataset. That depth means you can see not just where someone works now, but where they, and often their whole analyst class, went after leaving a given firm.
Top Use Cases for Career History
Use It to Turn a Cold Email Into a Warm One
Cold outreach lives or dies on relevance. Instead of sending a generic pitch, you can see that a prospect previously worked at a firm you already have ties to, or that their background lines up closely with the strategy you're raising for, and use that as the actual hook for the conversation. One firm asked substantive follow-up questions about the career history data specifically because it opened up new outreach angles they hadn't considered before, treating it as a genuine research input rather than a nice-to-have detail.
Use It to Filter for Diligence, Not Just Outreach
Career History isn't only useful for warming up a first email, it's also a way to build targeted lists for diligence. You can filter contacts by past employers to build a list of people with a specific institutional background, exactly the kind of targeted research that's difficult to do manually. One firm built a report filtered for a specific prior employer and called the resulting list genuinely useful for both outreach and diligence purposes.
Use It to Discover Connections You Didn't Know Existed
Sometimes the most useful part of Career History is simply realizing it exists. One firm hadn't explored the feature until it was shown to them directly, and immediately recognized its value once they saw what it surfaced, connections and background details they wouldn't have found any other way.
Query It Directly Through Dakota Joe
Career History is also queryable through Dakota Joe, so you don't need to build a custom filter every time. Try asking: "Show me all contacts who worked at Goldman Sachs between 2000 and 2005."
Find Your Next Real Connection Before You Hit Send
A generic pitch competes with every other generic pitch in someone's inbox. A pitch that references a shared background doesn't. Check a contact's Career History before your next outreach push, and let their own professional path do some of the work for you.
Book a demo to see Career History for the contacts already on your list.
FAQs
What does Career History show? A contact's full employment background, including the firms they've worked at and the roles they've held before their current position.
How many career histories does Dakota Marketplace track? 350,000+, tagged directly to contacts.
Can I query Career History using Dakota Joe? Yes. You can ask Joe directly, for example, "Show me all contacts who worked at Goldman Sachs between 2000 and 2005."
