Yipit is an alternative-data provider that generates investment research from sources such as credit-card receipts and app-download data. The company says it analyzes billions of data points every day and focuses on extracting the investment signal from noisy datasets. Its reports are used by more than 400 clients, including top buy-side firms, and have been reported to move specific stock names immediately upon release. Yipit is an 11-year-old company that has cut into traditional sell-side research by offering more real-time, predictive insights. Carlyle invested $475 million in Yipit, making it a unicorn with a valuation just over $1 billion, and CEO Vin Vacanti said the capital will be used to expand products and the client base. Competitors and some sell-side firms are reacting to Yipit's scale—Thinknum's cofounder said he is assembling a consortium of sell-side research shops and alternative-data vendors to increase alt-data adoption on the sell side. Carlyle managing director Anna Tye called Yipit "best-in-class" and said the firm views the company as creating a new market in an addressable space Carlyle estimates at $15–$20 billion. Yipit aggregates and normalizes daily deals from across the web, letting users search, filter and receive a single email with relevant deals. It tracks 335 active deal services in 32 North American cities and lists 161 active deals in New York City alone. The product attaches addresses and lat-long coordinates to venues to power discovery and potential future mobile apps. Yipit also sells competitive-intelligence reports to hedge funds and deal sites; those reports make up half its revenues, which are at a run-rate of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and growing. The site has 250,000 email subscribers (adding about 1,000 per day), sends 20,000 daily visits to third-party sites, and estimates 5–10% of referred users purchase deals. With seven employees now and plans to ramp to about 30, Yipit was close to break‑even and had roughly 15 months of cash before raising new funds to hire and expand to new cities. Yipit aggregates daily local deals from services like Gilt Local and Groupon and delivers a single personalized email of top selections. Users set preferences during signup and Yipit typically presents a handful (about a half-dozen) of tailored deals, while also allowing users to view a full list on its website. The site pulls together dozens of available deals depending on the city but filters them to match user interests. Yipit was founded in late 2008. The company confirmed it closed a $1.3 million funding round over the summer. The article frames Yipit's position amid a competitive market—Groupon, Yelp, and Gilt Local are moving into personalization and aggregation—meaning consolidation among clones is expected even as deal sources remain plentiful. Yipit aggregates daily deals from numerous Groupon-like sites into a single, easy-to-browse overview. The service tracks offers across third-party daily-deal websites and surfaced trends with visual data. After launching in mid-February, Yipit grew to track 66 Groupon-like sites in the U.S. and currently aggregates deals for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The company has attracted over 10,000 registered users who discovered about 18,000 deals in its first month and reportedly saved $100,000 collectively. Yipit plans to expand to additional cities including Atlanta, Las Vegas and London and is setting up city-specific Twitter accounts to distribute popular local deals. The startup recently raised $250,000 from friends and family.

Total raised

$483M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Dec 2021