The View from the Office.

I met up with Jose Plehn, the founder of BrightQuery, at Oyamel, the new Mexican restaurant from José Andrés at Hudson Yards. We had tacos and queso fundido.

BrightQuery aspires to be the Bloomberg of private company data and as someone who spent three decades at Bloomberg LP I can see the similarities.

Both started with an intense focus on collecting, scrubbing and organizing hard-to-gather data. In the case of Bloomberg it was the terms for corporate and government bonds. For BrightQuery it was tax data for private companies. 

Jose took the road less-traveled to becoming an entrepreneur. After spending his early childhood in Mexico City, he grew up in Geneva. He studied economics at MIT and got a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

He began an academic career at SUNY Buffalo before moving to Temple University. Life changed when he wrote an influential research paper on “sticky costs.” The paper argued cost structures respond asymmetrically to fluctuations in economic activity. 

The paper led to opportunities, including the chance to run a research center at UC Berkeley and later to teach finance at UCLA.

While at Temple, Jose had founded Powerlytics, a platform that provided aggregated, anonymized IRS tax return data for U.S. companies and households. 

In 2019, he founded BrightQuery to provide financials, corporate family trees, and legal data on more than 100 million U.S. firms. It was sourced from data provided agencies like the IRS, Department of Labor, SBA, and SEC

The idea had been germinating for more than a decade. The 2008 global financial crisis had convinced Jose that government data could be more accurate. As part of a research project he started collecting tax data in 2010.

It was that effort to gather tax data – much of it not available digitally – that reminded me of the early days of Bloomberg when the company manually entered data from bond prospectuses. 

Jose said that as he gave academic talks about the effort he would get approached by bankers interested in buying the data. That convinced him there was a business. 

BrightQuery spent its first three years building out the technology. Sales started in 2022. The company has 80 employees and is bootstrapped, with no outside investment.

The company collects tax data of all kinds (sales, franchise, payroll) and derives insights, providing perspective on the health of private companies.

Private company data has become increasingly important to hedge funds and private equity shops as fewer companies go public and the market for private credit expands. 

Jose said BrightQuery now displaces or complements data providers ranging from Dun & Bradstreet to Bloomberg for private company data. 

BrightQuery has replicated its data collection and analysis process in 150 countries leveraging more than 100,000 “connectors” to various agencies, which can be APIs, scrapers, data feeds, or even physical CDs sent by the IRS.

Jose can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.