Bloomberg Completes Acquisition of Canoe Intelligence

Bloomberg completed its acquisition of Canoe Intelligence this week. Canoe provides software that automates document intake and extracts data from subscription documents, investor reports and other fund paperwork for private-market asset managers.

Bloomberg will integrate Canoe’s document-processing and normalization tools into its private markets data and workflow products for institutional clients. The technology uses machine learning and structured workflows to convert unstructured documents into machine-readable data for reporting, portfolio monitoring and analytics.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Bloomberg will take ownership of Canoe’s technology and client contracts and plans to combine the team and product capabilities with its data services for asset managers, private equity and venture capital firms and other investors that manage alternatives.

Canoe’s software extracts key fields from PDFs and other document formats, maps them into standardized schemas and routes the output into downstream systems, reducing manual data entry. Bloomberg expects to use those capabilities to improve capture of private-market metrics and to streamline workflows that require staff to process large volumes of heterogeneous documents.

Demand for cleaner, timelier private-market data has increased in recent years, prompting financial data firms and software providers to expand tools for automated data ingestion and normalization. The acquisition brings Canoe’s extraction and normalization features into Bloomberg’s analytics and terminal services used by institutional investors and advisers.