Introducing the News API

We're excited to announce the public beta of our Sacra News API. Give it a private company, e.g., spacex.com, and it will return a list of news events for that company.

The wrinkle in our News API is that instead of just returning a list of news articles and links, we use AI to extract the substance of what the news is about. Then we group similar articles underneath that news event.

The upshot is that our News API delivers a company timeline on major milestones, funding, launches, hires and more—that, scrolled from beginning to end—gives you a powerful understanding of a startup's journey.

Check out our API documentation. To get access to our public beta, please email us at [email protected].

The news is a lightly structured, heterogeneous and primarily qualitative dataset with many edge cases. 

Having a human curate a dataset of news even for a single company turned out to be labor intensive with many repetitive tasks—but still requiring a modicum of semantic analysis and "human" intelligence.

It took awhile, and it was boring.

Enter AI. 

We created an assembly line where AI "read" 100,000+ news articles about startups, classified them by company, generated long and short-form summaries, grouped similar articles together under a single news event, merged similar news events together and then did QA on the end product.

What we ended up with is a machine that ingests unstructured or loosely structured data into structured data on private companies, which we use to power our News API—but which also serves as the foundation for generating a vast array of structured data about private companies.

Augment is a marketplace for private stock with the vision of creating a Bloomberg terminal for pre-IPO trading. Inside of Augment, you can view pricing data, connect with buyers and sellers and execute transactions end-to-end.

The team knows that a rich content and research experience in the app helps educate buyers and sellers, drives more time in-app and hooks users back for re-engagement—and that translates into transaction volume.

However, as a tech-forward company—not a traditional brokerage—Augment's approach is centered around scaling through software rather than building out services and research teams.

That's why Augment has teamed up with Sacra as its research partner to programmatically bring Sacra research into the Augment app experience, using our Documents API—for Sacra reports and interviews—our Revenue API—for Sacra revenue datasets—and now using our News API.

Augment's news section allows buyers and sellers to see what's happening with the company right now, and scroll back through their major milestones to understand their momentum and trajectory.

As Augment co-founder and CEO Noel Moldvai told us, "Sacra helps inform buyers and sellers on Augment. Working from similar information helps converge on price and get deals done faster."

Read more about Augment in our Sacra interview with co-founders Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley—and go to Augment to view our API in action.

Our mission is to bring more participation in private markets through research, analysis and data.

We'd love to chat with you about your use case for our API. Check out our API documentation and email us at [email protected] to get started.