Two decades since its formation, Dakota has transformed its business from raising capital to providing private market participants with data and tech services. It’s history is one of nimble adaptation and being able to divine the growing needs of a booming yet often opaque corner of the financial sector. Company President Rob Robertson spoke to Data Management Insight about Dakota’s past, present and future.
Data Management Insight: Hello Rob, can you tell us when Dakota was founded and what its foundational mission is?
Rob Robertson: We founded Dakota in 2006 in Philadelphia, originally as a boutique capital-raising firm for investment managers. We were on the road constantly, sitting across from allocators, trying to raise capital for our clients, and we ran into the same wall over and over, that there was no good source of accurate, actionable data on who actually allocates capital and what they’re looking for. The tools that existed were built by engineers who had never made a sales call. So the foundational mission was simple. We needed to build the resource we wished we had, one designed by fundraisers, for fundraisers, that would actually hold up in front of a real allocator. That mission, data built by people who’ve lived the problem, hasn’t changed since day one.
DMI: How, if at all, has that mission evolved since then?
RR: The core mission hasn’t changed, but the scope has grown enormously. We started as a firm doing capital raising services for a handful of investment managers. Once we built Dakota Marketplace, the database our own sales team used every day, we realised we’d built something the entire industry needed, not just us. So we evolved from a services firm into a data and intelligence platform serving roughly 1,500 investment firms worldwide, including some of the largest names in the business. We’ve also become a media company, with a blog, Substack, podcast, and events, because raising capital isn’t just about data, it’s about relationships and staying informed. The mission is still “build what fundraisers actually need,” just at a much bigger scale now.
DMI: Please explain how Dakota is helping private markets participants solve their data challenges?
RR: Private markets data has always been fragmented, stale or built for the wrong audience. Dakota Marketplace solves that by putting accurate, daily-updated information on allocators, family offices, RIAs, pensions, endowments and more, directly in front of investment sales professionals. Every account is curated by people who understand what a fundraiser actually needs to know, which is who is allocating, to what strategies, and who the right contact is. We layer institutional intelligence on top, search alerts, public plan meeting minutes, 13F holdings, Form ADV and Form D filings, so clients aren’t just getting contact records, they’re getting context. And because we integrate directly into Salesforce, HubSpot, Backstop and DealCloud, that intelligence lives inside the workflow that clients already use, rather than sitting in a separate tool they have to remember to check.
DMI: What are the specific pain points you solve for your clients?
RR: The biggest one is wasted time. Sales teams were spending hours chasing contacts who don’t actually allocate to outside managers, or working off data that was months out of date. We solve that by making sure every allocator account in Marketplace is a genuine, active target. Beyond that, we solve the “who do I even talk to” problem with 75-plus investment preference tags, so reps can find the right allocator for their specific strategy instead of guessing. We solve the “what’s happening right now” problem with daily search alerts and public plan minutes. And we solve the fragmentation problem where instead of juggling five different data sources, our clients get accounts, contacts, intelligence and CRM integration in one place.
DMI: What are the newest challenges that Dakota is helping clients overcome?
RR: International expansion is the big one right now. Our clients are increasingly looking beyond North America for capital, and international allocator data has historically been the weakest part of the industry’s data infrastructure. We’ve been investing heavily in expanding our coverage across Europe, the UK, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, and that build-out is accelerating. We’re also helping clients navigate a much more competitive fundraising environment generally. Allocators are more selective, cycles are longer and reps need sharper intelligence to even get a meeting. That’s pushed us to go deeper on things like public pension investment committee minutes and fee data, so our clients walk into conversations already knowing what an allocator cares about, rather than finding out in the room.
DMI: How do you harness AI for your clients and internally?
RR: We think about AI the same way we think about data. It only matters if it’s built by people who understand the workflow. Internally, we use AI to help our data team keep Marketplace accurate and current at a scale that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. For clients, we’ve built AI directly into how they access and use our data, including a Dakota Marketplace connector so intelligence can be pulled straight into the tools they already work in, rather than forcing them into another browser tab. The goal is to use AI to cut the time between “I have a question about an allocator” and “I have the answer,” which is really what we’ve always been trying to do.
DMI: What does Dakota see as the next big thing in client data needs?
RR: We think the next big shift is toward real-time, decision-ready intelligence rather than static records. Clients don’t just want to know that an allocator exists, they want to know the moment something changes, whether it is a new search, a staff change, a shift in investment preference. We’re also seeing growing demand for performance and benchmarking data that lets managers show, not just tell, how they stack up. And international coverage is only going to matter more as more of our clients raise capital globally rather than just domestically. The firms that win in the next few years will be the ones who can act on information within hours of it changing, not weeks, and that’s the direction we’re building toward.
DMI: What are your development plans for 2027?
RR: Three priorities. First, continuing to close the international data gap, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, where our client base is growing fast but our historical coverage was thinner than North America. Second, deepening our AI capabilities so clients can interact with Marketplace more naturally, asking questions and getting answers rather than building reports manually. Third, expanding the institutional intelligence layer, things like performance and fee data, so our clients are walking into meetings already understanding how they compare to the competition. Underneath all of it, the standard stays the same, in that everything we build has to be something our own sales team would actually use every day. That’s been true since 2006, and it’s not changing in 2027.
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