Work / Case Study
Redesigning a private markets platform so investors find companies faster.
Investors could look up a company they already knew. Finding one they did not was the slow part. We spent sixteen months rebuilding how people search, read and compare private company data across Southeast Asia and Australia. It went live in July 2026.
Challenge
Alternatives.pe is the deepest source of private market data in Southeast Asia and Australia. It is built from regulatory filings, which is why investors trust it and pay for it.
Private markets are hard to research anywhere. The facts are spread across filings, registries and news, so answering one question about one company can take three different tools.
The platform was already excellent for a company you could name. The room to grow was in everything else. Finding companies you had not heard of. Putting them side by side. Picking the job back up a week later.
What we did
Interviewed investors across venture, private equity, corporate development and placement
Ran workshops with the client to agree what to build first
Rebuilt search so it works for a company name and for a vaguer question
Redesigned company, fund and investor profiles around what gets checked first
Designed filters that take several answers at once, plus saved searches and watchlists
Built the design system, and wrote down how to use every part of it
Refreshed the brand across the product
Results
v3
The redesigned platform went live in July 2026.
16
Months of work across three phases, from the first user interview to the finished build.
5+
Core parts of the product redesigned: search, company profiles, investor profiles, charts and comparison.
Alternatives.pe is a private market intelligence platform for Southeast Asia and Australia. It covers more than 300,000 private companies and 14,000 fund managers, limited partners and family offices, drawn from regulatory filings and checked by people.
Investors, analysts and corporate development teams use it to check a company before a deal, to find new ones, and to follow a market. It knows this region better than the global platforms do, and that is what firms pay for.
In early 2024 the company set out to rebuild the product and the brand together. We worked on it for sixteen months, in three phases, next to their own product and research people and an outside development team.
The firms that move money in Asia run their research on it
Designing for three ways of working
Interviews across venture, private equity, corporate development and placement made three ways of working clear.
The Investment Analyst goes deep on one company before a meeting. The Market Explorer watches a sector and needs many companies side by side. The Funding Seeker works the other direction, looking for investors to approach.
Each one wants a different first screen. We designed a first screen for each.
Rebuilding search around two kinds of question
People arrive with a company name, or with a rough idea of what they want. Search now answers both. Type a few letters and the results come back in four groups: investors, funds, companies and people. You see the whole field before you pick.
The list views do the heavy lifting. You choose which columns to show, group them how you want, save the view and download the result. Location and investment stage were the two filters people used most. Those come first. The rarer ones stay out of the way until you ask for them.
Rebuilding the profiles
A profile is where the real work happens. It opens on the four things people check first: funding, valuation, sector and business model. Everything else comes after.
Funding, deals, news and headcount each get their own view. Every one is a table you can sort, search and download, so an analyst can stop retyping numbers into a spreadsheet.
Showing what a fund actually invests in
An investor profile answers a different question. It shows how big a cheque a fund usually writes and how many companies it holds. Then it compares what the fund says it invests in with what it has actually bought.
That comparison is the useful part. A fund that names twelve countries but has only ever invested in four has just told you something worth knowing.
Building the design system and the brand
We co-led the design system: one set of components, one way for them to behave, and one place to look them up. Every part of the product now draws from it.
The rebrand gave the platform a stronger look: a new logo, a new typeface and a clearer visual style. That matters for a product that has to feel solid to a fund manager and current to a founder.
We wrote down how each component works and when to use it. The developers could then build from it without guessing, and without work that had to be redone later.
Valuable takeaways
The redesigned platform went live in July 2026.
Sixteen months and three phases took it from the first user interview to a finished product: search, company and investor profiles, charts and comparison.
The change is in what the platform is for. It used to answer questions about companies you already knew. Now it helps you find them too.
Credits
Methods
- Analytics review (GA, Mixpanel, Hotjar)
- Brand asset design
- Competitor analysis
- Content and copy writing
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Design ops
- Design sprints
- Design system development
- Feature prioritisation mapping
- Heuristics analysis
- Interactive prototyping
- Stakeholder workshops
- User interviews
- User journey mapping
- Wireframing, lo-fi to hi-fi