The following is an opinion piece written by Mark Pacitti, CFA, Founder & Managing Director of Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform for investment professionals.
A question I get asked a lot on intro calls is some version of this: "We already pay for Tegus, so what does Woozle actually add?"
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the two are not competing versions of the same product. Tegus, now part of AlphaSense after a $930m acquisition in 2024, is a research library you subscribe to and search. Woozle is a research team you brief, who then design the questions, recruit the experts, run the interviews, verify the findings and hand you the result. One sells you access. The other does the work and gives you the output. Understanding that distinction is the whole point of this piece, and I'd rather you finish it able to decide for yourself than take my word for any of it.
I spent ten years on the buy-side at Goldman Sachs and Citadel buying primary research before I built Woozle. So I want to be clear up front about where Tegus is genuinely strong, because pretending otherwise would insult a reader whose entire job is to spot exactly that kind of selective framing.
What does Tegus actually sell?
Tegus built one of the most impressive content assets in the industry. The transcript library held over 100,000 expert interviews by mid-2024 and now sits north of 150,000, with thousands added every month and coverage spanning more than 35,000 public and private companies. AlphaSense folded that archive into its AI search platform, alongside broker research, filings and financial models, and the combined business now runs at roughly $600m in annual recurring revenue.
The commercial model is elegant. You pay an annual subscription, priced per seat and scaled to your firm, that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars per user. On top of that you pay to run your own calls, historically around $500 to $600 an hour, more recently marketed as a flat transcription fee of about $400 per call on top of the expert's rate. AlphaSense materially raised pricing after the acquisition, so the precise figure depends on when you signed and what you negotiated.
Here is the mechanism that makes those economics hold together. When you run a call through the platform, the transcript is, by default, added to the shared library. Every other subscriber can then read it. Your research funds the archive, and the archive is the product the next client pays to search. That flywheel is genuinely clever, and it is also the single most important thing to understand before you decide what work you route through it.
Where is the transcript library genuinely useful?
I will steal-man it properly, because fairness is the currency a skeptic trades in.
If you are getting oriented in a sector you do not yet cover, a deep searchable archive is a real advantage. You can read twenty past interviews on a supply chain, a competitor set, or a regulatory regime, build a mental map in an afternoon, and avoid paying for a live call to learn things the market already knew six months ago. For breadth, for speed of reading, and for background that does not need to be proprietary, it is a strong tool. We do not replace that, and I would not pretend to.
The library is also a reasonable way to commoditise the routine end of primary research. Plenty of expert calls are, frankly, not edge-generating. They are confirmation, context, or table stakes. Reading someone else's transcript on those topics is a perfectly sensible use of money and time.
Why does a shared library work against your edge?
Now the part that matters for the work you actually get paid for.
An edge is a view the market has not priced yet, built on information the market does not have. A shared transcript library is structurally the opposite of that. The questions in those transcripts were someone else's questions, framed around someone else's thesis, asked weeks or months ago. By the time you read one, every other subscriber has had the same opportunity. You are buying consensus, well indexed and easy to search, and the indexing does not make it any less consensus.
It gets sharper when the call is your own. Run a bespoke call through the library model and, unless you pay to keep it private, your discussion guide and the expert's answers become content for the next subscriber, including the fund sitting on the other side of your trade. You have effectively published your research design to the market. The expert was the pretext. The archive is the product, and it is not your archive.
AlphaSense has now layered an AI Interviewer onto the service that can run the call on your behalf. That is an interesting efficiency, but notice what it optimises for: more transcripts, generated faster, flowing into the same shared library. It scales the thing that dilutes your edge. The incentive is throughput into the archive, not conviction in your position.
What does Woozle actually do?
We do not run a library. We run a research process, end to end, for one client at a time, and the output belongs to that client alone.
You brief us in ten to fifteen minutes. From there we own the entire workflow. We design the discussion guide around your specific thesis rather than a generic template. We custom-recruit the experts for your project from a contacts database of over a billion people, instead of matching you to whoever already sits in a roster. We conduct the interviews ourselves, so you are never on the call. We fact-check and verify what experts tell us against Bloomberg, PitchBook and the public record rather than passing along unchecked assertions. Then we send you the raw data and a written synthesis.
None of it is resold. There is no shared library, no flywheel monetising your work back to the market, and no risk of your questions resurfacing in a competitor's search results. The research is custom-built, used once, and owned by you.
That is the cleanest line between the two models. Tegus monetises the transcript after the call. We have no transcript to monetise, because the entire output is yours.
We run around 14,000 expert calls a year for buy-side investors. Our analysts do roughly 30 to 40 calls a month each, one or two a day in normal flow and five or six a day at peak. We are honest about the trade-off: we will rarely know your target company as intimately as you do, because you live with it and we do not. What we bring instead is volume-earned craft. When you make that many calls, you get materially better at getting people to open up, at knowing which questions to press and which to drop, and at reading when an expert is hedging.
How do the two models compare on speed?
Speed is where the divergence is widest, and it matters because hedge funds and PE deal teams almost always want answers yesterday.
A traditional network typically takes four to six weeks to stand up a project of any real size. Woozle delivers 30-plus expert calls in five days. That was our average turnaround across more than a thousand projects last year, not a best case.
The reason we can do that comes down to operations and economics, not magic. Because we do all the work in-house at scale, we have built the machinery to find and contact experts fast, sourcing ten thousand or more relevant leads and reaching them within about an hour when a project demands it. And the biggest single lever on getting an expert to drop what they are doing and join a call is money. Here the pricing structure is decisive. A traditional network's markup can run around 500%, which means most of your fee never reaches the expert and you have little room to sweeten the offer. Our markup is roughly 50%. That gap means we can raise the bid to an expert, when speed requires it, without you paying more than you would have at a conventional network.
How does the cost actually break down?
The honest comparison is not subscription against subscription, because the two models put the cost in different places.
With the library model you carry a per-seat annual subscription, scaled to your firm, whether you run two calls or two hundred. On top sits the per-call charge. And underneath both sits the cost almost nobody puts on the invoice: your own analyst time. Every one-hour expert call you run yourself absorbs somewhere between one and two hours of desk time once you count briefing, vetting profiles, writing the discussion guide, taking notes and producing the write-up. On our numbers, that hidden labour adds up to somewhere between 14,000 and 28,000 analyst hours a year across the funds we work with, depending on how much prep each call demands. The low end assumes only the call hour itself; the high end assumes two hours of work around every call.
Woozle's pricing is deliberately transparent, because a skeptic should never be asked to take fairness on faith. It is a flat platform fee of £500 a month, billed annually at £6,000, with unlimited users. On top is pay-as-you-go: the expert's fee plus a disclosed 50% markup, around £450 per call on average, and you see what the expert earns and what we charge before anything runs. Because we design, conduct and write up the call for you, most of that hidden analyst time simply disappears.
The savings are not theoretical. We estimate buy-side investors saved roughly $18m in expert network fees through Woozle in 2025, measured against what a top-four network like GLG or Third Bridge would have charged at an assumed $1,500 per call. Some calls cost more than that and some less, but the direction is not in question.
Why does compliance keep coming up?
This one surprised me at first, and it now comes up repeatedly in onboarding calls with hedge fund and private equity compliance teams.
The least controllable moment in expert research is the live conversation between your investment professional and the expert. It is real time, it is unscripted, and no policy can fully control what gets said in it. That is precisely where wall-crossing and MNPI risk live. Because Woozle conducts the calls ourselves, your team never speaks to the expert directly, which puts a buffer between your professionals and that uncontrolled moment. More than one compliance lead has asked us why no one built this sooner. We have been FCA regulated continuously since 2016 with zero breaches.
A shared-library model cannot offer that buffer in the same way, because the entire value proposition depends on your analysts running and reading calls themselves.
When should you use Tegus, and when should you use Woozle?
I will not tell you which to buy, because that decision is yours and you are better at making it than any vendor pitch.
If your need is breadth, orientation, and reading what the market already discussed, the library is a legitimately good tool. Search it, build your map, and do not pay for a live call to learn something already sitting in an archive.
If your need is the bespoke call that informs a real position, where the question is yours, the expert is hand-picked for your thesis, the findings are verified, your team carries no live compliance exposure, and the output never resurfaces in a competitor's search bar, that is what we built Woozle to do. It is the half of the workflow a library cannot perform, because a library is by definition the opposite of bespoke.
Most serious funds end up running both and using each for what it is actually built for. That is the sensible answer, and I would rather give it to you straight than pretend we win every comparison.
Why can't the library model just do the custom work too?
Because its economics fight against it. A shared-library business needs your calls to become library content, or the flywheel stops turning and the subscription stops paying for itself. Custom, single-client, never-resold research is the one thing that model is structurally incentivised not to give you. The more private and bespoke your call, the less it is worth to the archive, and the archive is the business. None of that is an accusation. It is simply how the model works, and skeptics are paid to understand how models work.
I built Woozle the other way round, because it is the platform I wished I had when I was the one signing the invoices. The whole process is done for you, the output is custom, verified and yours alone, and nobody is selling your edge back to the market as a search result.
So I will end where the skeptic's instinct already is. Do not trust me that we are faster, cheaper or better. Pull the thread yourself. If you want to see what a Woozle project looks like next to whatever your network or transcript subscription is quoting you, get in touch and we will run a brief, like-for-like comparison on a live question, and you can decide.
Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform used by hedge funds, private equity funds, and capital markets professionals.
