Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
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.
Dakota Transactions covers 70,000+ verified private market deals, growing by approximately 6,000 new transactions every month across private equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure. Every record is researched and verified by Dakota's data team before publication, not algorithmically scraped from a press release, which means each transaction includes full participant visibility: buyer, seller, lender, advisor, investment bank, and law firm.
Deals are tagged by sector, industry, sub-industry, and transaction type, so deal teams, investment bankers, and private credit teams can build a precise, continuously updated feed for their exact market focus. The platform is Salesforce-native and compatible with DealCloud, Affinity, Dynamo, and API environments, so deal intelligence flows into the workflow a team already uses instead of sitting in a separate tab.
Best for: Deal teams, investment bankers, and private credit teams who need verified participant-level detail on every transaction, not just a headline.
Book a demo to see Dakota 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.
Book a demo to see it firsthand.
