Shiny pitch decks and optimistic business reports can be convincing, but are not always accurate — making it difficult for investors to ascertain how a company is *really* doing.

Second Measure is a startup in our current class that promises to bring some clarity to the process of analyzing companies and their success. Through partnerships with proprietary data providers, Second Measure has built a software platform that analyzes billions of consumer purchases to provide valuable insight into the sales and growth rates of public and private companies.

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney wrote about Second Measure in a recent story:

“[Second Measure co-founders Mike] Babineau and [Lillian] Chou showed me a demo of the product, comparing a couple
of ride-sharing companies, and the analysis presented by the web
application seemed pretty game-changing (check out some of the Uber data
on this company blog post).

Through Second Measure, investors can dig through operational metrics
like revenue and customer growth, retention and cohort analysis, while
also benchmarking companies against their competitors to track overall
market penetration.

The company is focusing its offering ‘primarily towards VCs and hedge
funds,’ according to Babineau, and it’s pretty easy to see why the
product would be attractive to them. Right now, venture capitalists are primarily scouring Second
Measure’s product to identify fast-growing companies, and hedge funds
are using it to ‘inform their financial models’ and anticipate the
earnings releases of public companies.”

Read in-depth about Second Measure in TechCrunch here.