The data layer behind Augment's $1B AUM marketplace

Augment is an online marketplace for private markets, where investors can buy and sell shares in private companies. We’ve worked with Augment since their seed round in 2022. Since then, Augment has raised a Series A ($12M, October 2025) and crossed $1B in assets under management with 10,000+ users.

“We want to build the Nasdaq for private markets,” says Josh Lim, Head of Engineering at Augment. “We're the infrastructure layer for processing all these transactions.”

That focus shapes where engineering time goes. Augment builds the financial infrastructure. Sacra provides the data investors check before they buy.

When an investor logs into Augment, the dashboard opens on live offerings, current opportunities to buy shares in private companies. From there, investors can search Augment's catalog, track companies on a personal watchlist, and browse upcoming opportunities before they go live. Below all of that sits a news feed, powered by Sacra and updated as stories come in.

From the feed, or from the watchlist sidebar, investors click through to a company's detail page, where most of the actual diligence happens. There's a chart of the company's price on the secondary market over time, alongside live indications of interest, so investors can see where the price has been and where real demand sits today.

A funding rounds view breaks out each round the company has raised, including the valuation and amount raised. And for understanding the business itself, there's Sacra: research reports and memos on the company's product, market, and competitors, plus Sacra's own revenue estimates.

"Anytime a user visits our dashboard or any company detail page, half of the page is populated with data from Sacra," says Josh. All of it is free for Augment users.

Sacra covers most of that ground. "95% of company-related data comes from Sacra," says Josh.

Data does two jobs on Augment. The first is helping investors decide. Before buying shares in a private company, users want research and news on it, the kind of information that's easy to find for public companies and scarce for private ones.

"It's important for us to figure out what's useful for our users, so they can come to our platform, stay, and eventually find an opportunity they want to invest into and make that investment," says Josh. "One of the key things we need to grab people's attention is being able to provide the data they're looking for."

The second job is keeping people coming back. Public markets produce activity every day. Private markets look quiet by comparison, and that quiet is a retention problem for a marketplace. "Private markets are always seen as a place where things don't really move," says Josh. "We wanted to change that."

Fresh content is how. "One of the ways was having news, so it's valuable for customers to come back to our platform instead of coming back only for an investment opportunity," says Josh. "That's where Sacra really helps us out, giving the latest data points on these companies."

Building that data layer in-house was never attractive. In Augment's earliest days, the team pulled company data manually, piecing it together wherever they could find it. Doing it properly would have meant buying access or hiring for it. "We'd probably have to purchase some kind of data API, and those are very expensive," says Josh. "Or we'd have to source it from different places and hire people to do it for us."

And some of the data has no substitute. "What's valuable is the research piece that Sacra publishes for each company," says Josh. "That's something you can't really find anywhere else. It's exclusive information. Beyond having to build a data team, that's something that's hard for us to get if it weren't for Sacra."

The bar for accuracy is high, too. Augment is a regulated business, and the numbers investors see inform real transactions. Reliable sourcing is a core requirement.

The integration runs entirely through the Sacra API. “At this point, 100% of our engineering integration with Sacra is via the Sacra API,” says Josh. “We hit their endpoint to pull research data, we hit their endpoint to pull the news data.”

Augment uses three parts of the API:

A daily ingestion job pulls new research and news from Sacra and stores it on Augment's side, so nothing is fetched on page load. Each company in Augment's catalog is matched to its Sacra record by domain, and new data lands on the right pages automatically.

Getting there took little support. “Danny [Tharma, Head of Engineering & Product at Sacra] did a really good job having really good documentation,” says Josh. “And I really love the sandbox environment, the interactive developer portal where you can try out the endpoints from the API doc directly. It makes it really clear what's going on.” After the early days, the team was fully self-serve.

That's a long way from where the partnership started. “The first set of APIs, there wasn't even a doc,” says Josh. “It was an email from Danny saying, hey Josh, try this out, here's your API key. Now it's docs.sacra.com. It's a lot better.”

The relationship runs both ways. Augment has been a design partner since Sacra's early days, and the news endpoint exists because Augment asked for it.

Sacra's role extends into what Augment builds next. As Augment opens its own API, letting partners onboard investors, run KYC, and process trades on its infrastructure, Sacra data flows through with it. “The data piece, Sacra's crucial there,” says Josh.

Everything Augment built runs on the same endpoints available to any developer. Try them in the interactive sandbox at docs.sacra.com.

Augment Markets Inc. is a technology company offering software and data services. Brokerage services are offered through Augment Capital LLC, an affiliated broker-dealer and member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advisory services are offered through Augment Advisors LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser.