British data and analytics company Preqin, founded over two decades ago, has been acquired by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, for a staggering £2.55bn. The sale will see Preqin’s founder, Mark O’Hare, receive a significant sum of £2.04bn through his family holding company Valhalla Ventures. The remaining £510m will be shared among Preqin’s management and employees.
Preqin, headquartered near London’s Victoria station and with a global presence in major financial centers such as New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong, employs over 500 people. The acquisition is expected to make a number of them millionaires, highlighting the magnitude of the deal.
The sale also has a significant impact on O’Hare’s personal net worth, surpassing that of BlackRock’s founder, Larry Fink, who is one of the most influential figures in the financial world. O’Hare will join BlackRock as a vice-chair and expressed his excitement about the potential for collaboration between the two companies in delivering better private markets data and analytics to their clients.
O’Hare, a graduate of the University of Cambridge and London Business School, has a successful track record of building and selling businesses. He previously sold his financial information provider, Citywatch, to Reuters in 1998 and launched Private Equity Intelligence, now known as Preqin, in 2003. As private equity gained popularity as an asset class, so did Preqin, which acquired Baxon Solutions in 2016 and Colmore in 2021.
The sale of Preqin comes at a time when data providers are in high demand, with companies like IHS Markit and Thomson Reuters’ financial and risk business, Refinitiv, being acquired for billions of pounds in recent years. For BlackRock, the acquisition of Preqin presents an opportunity to expand its presence in the private markets sector, which is gaining increasing interest from fund managers and their clients.
Outside of the business world, O’Hare and his wife, Lindy, who have four children, have a passion for the arts. They recently built an open-air theatre, Thorington Theatre, on their property in Suffolk, England, which has already attracted a significant audience. With the acquisition of Preqin, the O’Hares are now in a position to offer singer Ed Sheeran a substantial fee to perform at their theatre, fulfilling a long-held dream.