PitchBook

John Gabbert founded PitchBook in 2007, in the midst of the financial crisis; the Seattle-based company compiles venture capital, IPO and M&A data. Before founding PitchBook, Gabbert had long worked in venture capital and private equity data and led the team behind the VentureSource investment report. Of the timing, he said: “Timing was definitely an uphill battle.”⁠[1]

PitchBook states that Gabbert founded the company to bring transparency to the private capital markets; it later added news, institutional research and analysis tools, which together make up the PitchBook Platform.⁠[2]

In September 2009 Morningstar invested $1.2 million in PitchBook as a Series A preferred investor, and in January 2016 it invested a further $10.0 million as a Series B preferred investor, after which it owned about 20 percent of the company.⁠[3]

Gabbert said he had approached Morningstar as a potential investor because he admired its “entrepreneurial spirit and innovative products.” By October 2016 PitchBook had raised only $14.25 million in total; Morningstar president Kunal Kapoor had sat on PitchBook’s board since 2012.⁠[1]

The January 2016 financing valued PitchBook at $160 million. In June that year the company hired Rod Diefendorf as chief operating officer, as part of plans to hire more than 100 people that year and grow to more than 600 employees.⁠[4]

In the five years to December 31, 2015, PitchBook’s sales bookings grew at a compound annual rate of more than 70 percent, and over the three years to October 2016 its client count tripled to more than 1,800.⁠[3]

In September 2016 PitchBook formed a data partnership with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA); the two began publishing a quarterly venture capital report, the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, with the first edition in October that year.⁠[4]

The NVCA describes PitchBook as its official data provider; the Venture Monitor tracks U.S. venture investment, fundraising and exits each quarter.⁠[5]

On October 14, 2016, Morningstar announced a definitive agreement to acquire the remaining ownership of PitchBook Data, Inc. it did not already hold for about $180 million, subject to working capital adjustments, valuing PitchBook at $225.0 million; PitchBook would keep its brand, with Gabbert continuing as CEO. Kapoor said: “Data has always been Morningstar’s sweet spot.”⁠[3]

At the announcement PitchBook had about 300 employees, mainly in Seattle, New York and London, plus nearly 300 contractors in Ukraine and India, and about 1,800 clients; its database covered some 718,000 companies, 533,000 investments, 162,000 investors and 35,000 funds. Morningstar planned to fund the cash consideration by expanding its existing revolving credit facility.⁠[6]

PitchBook’s revenue for the 12 months ended June 30, 2016, was $31.1 million; investing heavily in expansion, it had posted a net operating loss for several years. After the acquisition Gabbert would report to Kapoor, who became Morningstar’s CEO on January 1, 2017.⁠[7]

On December 1, 2016, Morningstar announced that it had completed the acquisition. PitchBook then had about 600 team members in Seattle, New York, London, Ukraine and India and served more than 1,800 clients.⁠[8]

In 2022 Morningstar acquired LCD for $650 million and integrated it into the PitchBook Platform.⁠[2]

On May 8, 2024, PitchBook announced that founder John Gabbert would step down as CEO and work with Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor to choose a successor, with COO Rod Diefendorf and the executive leadership team handling management in the interim. Gabbert said: “it’s our people that have made this all possible.”⁠[2]

On May 22, 2024, Morningstar announced the appointment of Rod Diefendorf as president and chief operating officer of PitchBook, leading the company after Gabbert and reporting to Kapoor. Diefendorf had been PitchBook’s COO since 2016 and had nearly 30 years of experience at startups and large technology companies.⁠[9]

On March 4, 2025, Morningstar announced that it had completed, the previous day, the acquisition of Lumonic, a private credit portfolio monitoring and management platform; terms were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Lumonic automates the collection and verification of borrower financial data and helps lenders track covenant compliance in real time; it operates as a PitchBook subsidiary.⁠[10]

Morningstar described the acquisition as extending PitchBook into ongoing portfolio monitoring and risk assessment.⁠[11]

On November 10, 2025, PitchBook launched PitchBook Navigator, a generative AI feature that answers natural-language questions about companies, transactions and market themes; it became generally available to subscribers later that month. The company also announced an upcoming Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector giving subscribers access to its private market data within ChatGPT. Chief product officer Paul Jaeschke said: “AI is only as powerful as the data and research behind it.”⁠[12]

On September 10, 2026, PitchBook announced that it had become a data partner for ChatGPT for Financial Services, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s offering for investment banking and equity research teams, supplying firmographic data on companies, investors and funds through its Essential connector. PitchBook said its AI platform partners also include AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, Perplexity and Rogo.⁠[13]

On October 14, 2026, at TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry Disrupt in San Francisco, PitchBook announced agentic capabilities for PitchBook AI, Skills and Agents, that run repeatable analysis on a schedule, due to go live in the fourth quarter, and launched PitchBook Data MCP, which gives customers company, deal, investor and fund data inside their own tools and models and is available on request. The company said usage of its Premium Connector had grown nearly 2,000 percent year to date.⁠[14]

PitchBook delivers its offerings mainly through the PitchBook platform and direct data products such as APIs and data feeds, covering companies, investors, funds, deals and executives, with research and analytics on private equity, venture capital, credit and M&A, plus mobile apps, CRM integrations and Excel and PowerPoint plug-ins; the platform is priced mainly by the number of licensed users. Its full-time analysts cover 30 sectors and published more than 2,400 research reports in 2025.⁠[11]

AI-enabled features include PitchBook Navigator, profile and investor summaries, transcript summaries, the VC Exit Predictor and machine-learning valuation estimates; its data is also available within Anthropic and OpenAI large language models. Morningstar lists its main competitors as Beauhurst, FactSet, MSCI, Preqin, Refinitiv and S&P GlobalS&P GlobalS&P Global Inc. is a financial information company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that provides credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions for global capital and commodity markets. Its divisions include S&P Global Ratings and S&P Dow Jones Indices.Open the full entry Market Intelligence.⁠[11]

In 2023 the PitchBook segment generated $551.9 million in revenue and served more than 100,000 users.⁠[2]

In 2025 the PitchBook segment’s revenue was $671.8 million, up 8.6 percent from $618.4 million in 2024, with adjusted operating income of $210.1 million and an adjusted operating margin of 31.3 percent. Morningstar said fourth-quarter growth came mainly from the investor and advisor client segments and the direct data business, while the corporate client segment remained soft.⁠[15]

As of December 31, 2025, PitchBook served approximately 10,200 client accounts and 113,451 licensed users. Its annual revenue renewal rate for the platform and direct data products was approximately 103 percent in 2025, down from 108 percent in 2024, which Morningstar attributed to softness in the corporate client segment.⁠[11]

As of October 2026, PitchBook said it served more than 100,000 clients worldwide and had more than 3,000 employees, with offices in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, London, Singapore, Mumbai and elsewhere; it has been a subsidiary of Morningstar since 2016. Its U.S. headquarters is in Seattle, Washington, and its European headquarters in London.⁠[14][16]

The leadership team listed on PitchBook’s website includes president and chief operating officer Rod Diefendorf, chief product officer Paul Jaeschke, chief financial officer Patrick Ross, executive vice president of research and market intelligence Nizar Tarhuni, and executive vice president of technology and engineering Thomas Van Buskirk.⁠[17]