Work / Case study
Redesigning a private markets platform so investors find companies faster.
Investors could look up companies they already knew about. Finding one they had not heard of was the slow part. We spent 16 months rebuilding a platform for searching, reading and comparing data on private companies across Southeast Asia and Australia.
Challenge
Alternatives.pe is the deepest source of private market data in Southeast Asia and Australia. The data is built from regulatory filings, which is why investors trust it and pay for it.
Private markets are hard to research. 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 looking up companies users could name. The room for growth was in everything else: finding companies they had not heard of, putting companies side by side for comparison, picking up where they left off a week later.
What we did
Interviewed investors across venture, private equity, corporate development and placement
Ran workshops with the client to agree on what to build first
Rebuilt search so it works for a company name and for less specific questions
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 documented implementation guidelines
Refreshed the brand across the product
Results
v3
The redesigned platform went live in July 2026.
16
Months of work across 3 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 with data drawn from regulatory filings and checked by people.
Investors, analysts and corporate development teams use it to check a company before a deal, find new ones and follow a market. It knows this region better than global platforms do, and that is what users pay for.
The company set out to rebuild the product and the brand together. We worked on it for 16 months, in 3 phases, alongside their own product and research people and an external development team.
The firms that move money in Asia run their research on Alternatives.pe.
Designed for 3 ways of working
Interviews across venture, private equity, corporate development and placement uncovered 3 use cases.
The Investment Analyst would go deep on a company before a meeting. The Market Explorer watching a sector would need data on many companies side by side. The Funding Seeker would work in the other direction, looking for investors to approach.
Each user persona had a distinct goal at entry, so we designed a custom home screen for each of them.
Rebuilt search around 2 kinds of question
Users would arrive with a company name or a rough idea of what they wanted. Search now solved for both: type a few letters and the results would come back in four groups: investors, funds, companies and people. Users would see the whole field before they picked a company.
The list views did the heavy lifting: users could customise columns, group data, save views and download the results. Location and investment stage were prioritised as these were the 2 filters users used most. The secondary filters stayed out of the way until needed.
Rebuilt the profiles
Company profiles opened with the four things users would check first: funding, valuation, sector and business model. Everything else came after.
Funding, deals, news and headcount each got their own view, a table that users could sort, search and download. Analysts no longer had to retype numbers into spreadsheets.
Showed what funds actually invest in
Investor profiles showed funds’ typical cheque sizes and how many companies they held, then compared what the funds had claimed they invested in with what they had actually bought.
That comparison was the useful part. By revealing that a fund named 12 countries but only ever invested in 4, for instance, the platform would be giving its users critically important information.
Built 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 drew from it.
The rebrand gave the platform a stronger look: a new logo, a new typeface and a clearer visual style. That mattered for a product that had to feel solid to a fund manager and current to a founder.
We wrote down how each component worked 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
Users came for the data and judged the interface second. Each of them worked differently, so the gains were in removing what got in their way.
Users arrived with a company in mind. The value was in what they found by following the connections out from it.
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