How To Identify Acquisition Targets With AI-Powered Search

AlphaSense Staff


May 18, 2019

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AlphaSense helps users research industries and companies quickly by accessing a curated database of millions of documents. Users save hours of time by searching, viewing, and sorting their results within one simple platform view. By leveraging AlphaSense’s proprietary Smart Search technology, users are able to sort by relevance, expand searches using AI, and find what others miss.


Using AlphaSense to identify potential M&A targets

For example, we can use AlphaSense AI-powered professional search to research the grocery industry and identify potential acquisition targets.

Supermarkets are largely fragmented and generally operate within a city or region. For example, New York’s Fairway stores operate in lower New York and Northern New Jersey, and Vons (now a subsidiary of Albertsons, also a private company), can only be found in Southern California and Southern Nevada. In such a low-margin business, pressured by much larger companies such as Kroger ($KR), Walmart ($WMT) and now even Amazon, consolidation may be coming.

For this example, let’s assume you’re a grocery retailer that recently went public, and plans to use the proceeds of their equity raise to fund acquisitions of regional grocers.

Related: Amazon Go, Whole Foods, And The Future Of Grocery

Using AlphaSense, you could quickly look at a few key players to assess company size. Let’s say a user on your strategy team is interested in Publix, an employee-owned company. She could type in Publix revenue as a keyword search in AlphaSense.

What she’d quickly find is the latest 8K from Publix which mentions all of its latest revenue data.

Publix Acquisition Search

The same search can then be performed for other companies on her watchlist. Extending the search to include other sources, like broker research and analysis can give a broader perspective about how the Street views the sector overall, and how they’re talking about specific companies.



AlphaSense AI-powered professional search makes finding this information faster and easier than ever before. By gathering more information in less time, AlphaSense users can quickly compile the data they need to make smarter business decisions.

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