Getting the first client was terrifying, Jack Kokko told an interviewer in 2016, because he had to make the call himself. He is not a salesperson. He had never cold called anyone.
He grew up in Finland. Before the software, there were small jobs: delivering newspapers and cleaning furnaces. He has said they taught him to do his best at whatever he was doing. A teaser for a 2025 interview adds that as a boy he experimented with electronics.
Before the software, there were small jobs: delivering newspapers and cleaning furnaces.
Profiles say he studied engineering and finance in Finland, then went into telecom banking in London. He talked Morgan Stanley into sending him to Silicon Valley, where it seemed like the place to be, and spent his days as a technology analyst in Menlo Park, digging through filings by hand. The work was slow. It was also an itch. To build a platform for professionals, he has said, you have to have been one of them.
At Wharton he met Raj Neervannan, an engineer, and the two built something that read documents the way an analyst wanted them read. What almost nobody sees is the wait. It took two or three years of development before the beta. Then Kokko and the team gave it to a few hedge funds and worked with them for close to a year before anyone paid. He was trying to build something he had himself needed, in a market where the incumbent was Bloomberg.
The first sale arrived, and so did the next. By late 2016 AlphaSense had over 500 clients, seats cost thousands of dollars a year each, and it had just raised $33 million. He has said he thinks of funding as a tool for growth.
The next decade was bigger than he could have made on calls alone. The company's recurring revenue passed $500 million in October 2025 and $600 million in early 2026. In June 2026 it raised $350 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, nearly double a mark of about $4 billion set after buying the expert-call firm Tegus.
There is a founder lesson in the order of things. Kokko did not start as a salesman. He started as a user with a problem, spent years making the product good enough to give away, and had to make the frightening call only after that.