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Jack Kokko

Jack Kokko is the founder and chief executive of AlphaSense, a New York-based AI-powered market intelligence and search platform used by investment banks, asset managers, and corporations to analyze equity research, company filings, earnings calls, news, and expert interviews [1][3][11]. Before founding the company, he worked as a senior analyst in Morgan Stanley's investment banking division from 1997 to 2000, an experience he has described as central to his motivation for building AlphaSense [7][12]. He recounts that during the dot-com boom, working on technology mergers and acquisitions deals out of Morgan Stanley's Silicon Valley office, he struggled to consume the volume of information required at the pace deals demanded, despite having access to financial data terminals, and grew frustrated that no equivalent of Google existed for financial and business research [12]. That gap, which he and early clients came to describe as wanting "Google for finance," became the founding premise of AlphaSense in 2008 [4][12].

Kokko has said AlphaSense's earliest technical achievement was a semantic search engine capable of linking financial terminology, such as recognizing "revenue" and "topline" as equivalent concepts, and reliably surfacing relevant data across global filings and earnings calls regardless of vocabulary or geography, at a time when analysts still searched documents term by term [12]. He notes the company used artificial intelligence from its founding, including classification models trained with large annotated datasets to detect sentiment and document type, which he argues still outperform general-purpose large language models on certain deep financial classification tasks [12]. According to Kokko, the platform has since evolved into a generative-AI-driven system that allows natural-language queries and produces narrative summaries across thousands of sources, with one AI-generated research report now replacing work that previously took analyst teams roughly three weeks to produce [12][14]. He has cited AlphaSense's customer base as encompassing roughly 6,000 organizations, including about 90 percent of top asset management firms, all major investment banks, and more than half of the Fortune 500 [12].

Kokko has overseen several major acquisitions and financings that expanded AlphaSense's scope. He describes the acquisition of Stream as adding a searchable library of expert interview transcripts, sourced from conversations with former executives, competitors, and customers, intended to give investors unfiltered insight beyond company-provided information [11]. He has also discussed the 2024 acquisition of Tegus, a platform specializing in investor-led expert interviews with particular strength in coverage of private companies, which he identified as a longstanding customer request [14]. That period included a $650 million financing round valuing AlphaSense at $4 billion, following an earlier $225 million raise led by Goldman Sachs that he said helped the company double its user base year over year [11][14]. Kokko has stated that while an initial public offering is not planned in the near term given the company's cash position, he views it as part of AlphaSense's longer-term path [11].

In addition to his operating role, Kokko has held public conversations positioning AlphaSense within broader industry and leadership discussions, including hosting a keynote discussion with former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at AlphaSense's 2025 AlphaSummit conference, covering leadership and decision-making under pressure [13][15]. Earlier in his career, before founding AlphaSense, he was chief executive and co-founder of Silecs, Inc. from 2000 to 2008 and later served as founding non-executive chairman of BetterDoctor from 2011 to 2017 [6][5]. He holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Oulu, a bachelor's degree in finance from the Helsinki School of Economics, and an executive MBA from the Wharton School [8][9][10].

Founded

Experience

  1. CEO and Founder
    AlphaSense, Inc.2008 to Present
  2. Founding Chairman, non-executive
    BetterDoctor2011 to 2017
  3. CEO & Co-Founder
    Silecs, Inc.2000 to 2008
  4. Senior Analyst
    Morgan Stanley1997 to 2000

Education

Media & appearances

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