The View from the Office.

I caught up with Harald Collet, co-founder of Alkymi, at Yama Ramen on West 48th Street in midtown. It’s one of those New York City gems, hidden on the second floor, that gets packed at noon. I had the spicy vegetable bowl.

Harald started his career at Oracle in product development before moving to Autonomy where he focused on business development. He joined Bloomberg in 2010 and went on to start BVault, the company’s compliance business.

After years of working for large companies, he became an entrepreneur at the age of 40. He co-founded Alkymi in New York with Adam Kleczewski and Steven She, a data scientist and an engineer.

Initially focused broadly on data extraction from documents, the startup quickly turned to filling a gap in the fast-growing market for data on private companies.

Harald said Alkymi has found its niche in helping operations teams to leverage AI to process complex, unstructured financial data about private companies that’s buried in PDFs. This data is valuable because it’s needed for accounting, performance, risk, and valuations for billions of dollars invested. The Alkymi system can also summarize any document or piece of content in more than 95 languages.

With private markets assets growing more than 10% a year and much faster than public markets, it’s crucial for investment firms to capture and understand data about their investments. Alkymi standardizes all this unstructured data into something useful.

He said the company saw 300% growth of usage on the platform last year.

Harald also sits on the board of one of Europe’s largest Christmas tree companies which seems random until you realize it’s named Collet and is a family business. He said the company grows 600,000 trees a year and buys another 400,000 for resale.

Harald reminded me that I played a small role in his landing a job at Bloomberg. He was having dinner in Copenhagen and asked a friend, who happened to be a Bloomberg journalist, for advice. That person suggested he send me a resume.

You can reach Harald via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.