S&P Global Buys “With Intelligence” for $1.8 Billion, Proving You Can Literally Buy Smarts Now

Let’s be honest: you probably didn’t read the S&P Global press release today. You encountered it—like a dense fog bank of corporate jargon, drifting across your screen and whispering “synergy” in your ear until you blacked out.

S&P Global, which already owns half of every spreadsheet in finance, announced it will acquire “With Intelligence” from Motive Partners for $1.8 billion. The goal? To “cement its leadership in private markets intelligence.” The subtext? To make you feel deeply inferior for not knowing what a “workflow solution” is.

But fear not, dear reader. SiliconSnark is here to make this fun, light-hearted, and (dare we say) informative—because if we don’t, this release might collapse under its own density and form a black hole of acronyms that devours LinkedIn.

The TL;DR (Too Long; Definitely Read Later)

Here’s the short version:
S&P Global—a company already synonymous with data, ratings, benchmarks, and everything you never want to manually update in Excel—is buying With Intelligence, a data analytics company focused on private markets.

Private markets, for the uninitiated, are basically where rich people buy things that aren’t stocks—think private equity, hedge funds, and your cousin’s “infrastructure” fund that’s definitely just a golf course.

S&P says the acquisition will “create one of the most comprehensive data offerings for alternatives and private markets participants.” Translation: “We now officially own all the numbers.”

A Match Made in Spreadsheet Heaven

According to the press release, this “combination unlocks new market opportunities and cements S&P Global as one of the most comprehensive providers of private markets intelligence.”

In plain English: S&P Global looked around, realized there was a corner of finance it didn’t yet dominate, and said, “Let’s fix that.”

“With Intelligence” (and yes, that’s the company’s actual name—it sounds like the answer to “how do you want your analytics served?”) brings data covering:

• ~30,000 investors
• ~30,000 managers
• ~70,000 funds
• ~350,000 deals

Basically, if it moves money in a non-public market, S&P now owns the map. Somewhere, a Bloomberg terminal just shed a tear.

The Numbers No One Asked For

Buried in paragraph 47 of this 2,000-word legal sleep aid, S&P reveals that With Intelligence will add $130 million in revenue in 2025, growing in the “high teens.”

That’s right—S&P Global just spent $1.8 billion to gain a business that makes $130 million a year. But don’t worry, they’ve projected “organic annual contract value growth in the high teens.”

Because nothing gets investors more excited than the phrase “organic annual contract value growth.”

The People Behind the Acronyms

Founder Charlie Kerr launched With Intelligence back in 1998, when “alternative assets” mostly meant CDs that came with free AOL trials. Since then, the firm’s become a go-to data source for hedge funds, private equity, and anyone who enjoys saying “allocators” in conversation.

Now Kerr and team will join S&P Global—home to some of the most advanced analytics ever devised to justify your management fees. He called it “a key milestone in our growth,” which is the press release equivalent of “we’re cashing out.”

Meanwhile, Motive Partners, the private investment firm selling With Intelligence, described the deal as “a case study of the impact of our proven model.” It’s unclear if that model involves writing press releases dense enough to qualify as geological formations.

The Quote Parade

Every executive involved contributed a quote that could double as AI training data for “Corporate Communications GPT.”

• Martina Cheung, CEO of S&P Global: “We are expanding the trusted legacy of S&P Global into private markets.”
  → Translation: We’d like to be your data daddy for the stuff that isn’t on the NASDAQ.
• Saugata Saha, President of Market Intelligence: “This combination unlocks differentiated intelligence across private equity and private credit.”
  → Translation: Our PowerPoint slides are about to get even more expensive.
• Rob Heyvaert, Motive Partners Founder: “A powerful proof point of our investment lifecycle thesis.”
  → Translation: We made money. Thank you for coming to our TED Talk.

The Section Nobody Ever Reads (and That’s Fine)

No corporate epic is complete without the “Forward-Looking Statements” section—a ritual sacrifice to the gods of legal compliance.

It’s 800 words of pure, undiluted lawyer energy, featuring phrases like:

• “worldwide economic, financial, political, and regulatory conditions (including slower GDP growth or recession…)”
• “natural and man-made disasters, civil unrest, public health crises (e.g., pandemics)”
• “fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates”

Basically, it’s S&P’s way of saying: “We have no idea what’s going to happen, but please don’t sue us when the next pandemic hits.”

Why This Actually Matters (A Little)

Behind all the corporate throat-clearing, this is actually a big deal.

S&P’s acquisition of With Intelligence signals that the real frontier for financial data isn’t the public markets—it’s the opaque, relationship-driven world of private capital.

With Intelligence tracks limited partners (LPs), general partners (GPs), and every acronym in between. Combine that with S&P’s existing empire—Capital IQ, Market Intelligence, and a small thing called the credit rating system that literally determines how expensive your debt is—and you’ve got a one-stop shop for financial omniscience.

They’re not just selling data anymore. They’re selling the feeling of knowing something before everyone else does.

The Big Picture

As the press release notes, alternative assets are expected to hit $40 trillion by the end of the decade. If that number makes your eyes widen, good. That’s why S&P just spent $1.8 billion to get a bigger seat at that table.

It’s also why you’ll soon be seeing headlines like:

“S&P Global launches AI-powered Benchmark for Private Markets Data Transparency™”
or
“S&P Global introduces iLEVEL+GPT for frictionless fund intelligence synergy.”

You’ve been warned.

Final Thoughts: Reading With Intelligence

S&P Global says this deal “cements its leadership in private markets intelligence.”
We say it cements their leadership in making corporate prose sound like a Dune prophecy.

Still, beneath the jargon and EPS projections, it’s a smart move. S&P wants to dominate every corner of financial data—public, private, or imaginary. And now they’ve literally bought “Intelligence.”

Let’s just hope that the next time they announce a deal, they include an executive summary in plain English—or at least a decoder ring.