AlphaSense uses Kernel to operationalize vertical GTM and focus sales on high-growth sub-verticals

>400 outbound reps

Series F

Market Intelligence

50%

Headcount accuracy improvement

15%

Improved revenue capacity per rep

HQ: New York, US

Founded: 2011

Website: alpha-sense.com

AlphaSense runs on Kernel

Kernel’s data accuracy exceeded our expectations. Having transparent reasoning behind every entity and firmographic attribute means I can actually trust the CRM without needing to constantly double-check and verify.

Mityu Dinev

International Revenue Operations Lead

Key insight:
5,000+ duplicate accounts resolved & 10,000+ accounts enriched and activated for the pipeline.

Introduction

RevOps at AlphaSense drives the company’s growth strategy by organizing go-to-market coverage around top-level industries such as financial services, professional services, and life sciences.

AlphaSense, headquartered in New York City, is an AI platform redefining market intelligence and workflow orchestration, trusted by 6,500 of leading organizations worldwide to drive faster, more confident decisions in business and finance. The platform combines domain specific AI with a vast content universe of over 500 million premium business documents — including equity research, earnings calls, expert interviews, filings, news, and internal proprietary content. Purpose-built for speed, accuracy, and enterprise-grade security, AlphaSense helps teams such as competitive intelligence, corporate strategy, and research and development extract critical insights, uncover market-moving trends, and automate complex workflows with high quality outputs. With AI solutions like Generative Search, Generative Grid, and Deep Research, AlphaSense delivers the clarity and depth professionals need to navigate complexity and obtain accurate, real-time information quickly.

In high-stakes environments like investing, corporate strategy, and market intelligence the winners are not the teams with more information. They are the teams that can turn trusted intelligence into conviction faster than everyone else. AlphaSense provides an intelligence foundation with purpose-built AI systems designed to continuously analyze trusted information, transforming it into decision-ready conviction at speed.

Within its critical customer segments, RevOps identifies specific sub-verticals such as investment banking, hedge funds, private equity, asset management, and consulting where AlphaSense has proven product-market fit. From there, SDR coverage and account allocation are structured around those opportunities.

Executing this strategy requires account data that is accurate enough to support precise segmentation and reliable account allocation. However, most CRM datasets rely on broad industry classifications that fail to capture how companies actually operate. Accounts are misclassified, emerging niches are missed, and subsidiaries operating in different sub-verticals are flattened into a single parent record.

Fixing the foundation: identity resolution, deduplication, and hierarchy correction

Ahead of territory planning, Kernel focused on establishing a reliable entity foundation inside the CRM.

Kernel first resolved the real-world organization behind each account by analyzing multiple data sources, including account names, entity legal names, email domains, LinkedIn company pages, addresses, and company websites. Website analysis plays a key role in this process, verifying the correct corporate domain, identifying invalid or placeholder URLs, and detecting when multiple CRM records reference the same underlying company.

Once identity was established, Kernel automatically surfaced structural issues across the CRM. Duplicate accounts were identified and merged, inactive or invalid records were removed, and subsidiaries were associated with their correct parent organizations. Kernel’s agents drive these corrections by reasoning over data points such as company websites, domains, LinkedIn pages, and CRM context to determine whether records represent the same entity or a true subsidiary relationship.
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Key insight:
AlphaSense reclaimed approximately 20% of weekly time previously spent on reactive account data hygiene and research.

Each mass action decision includes transparent reasoning, and actions are executed under risk thresholds so high-confidence cases can be automated while ambiguous ones are surfaced for RevOps review. This allows large-scale cleanup and hierarchy correction to happen safely without disrupting account ownership or territory structures.

Because identity and hierarchy are resolved together, Kernel builds a complete corporate structure across parents, subsidiaries, and operating units while cleaning the data. This ensures that each account represents a real company and that its relationships reflect how the organization actually operates.

By implementing Kernel ahead of territory planning, AlphaSense transformed its CRM from a collection of flat records into a structured entity graph of verified organizations. This clean entity foundation became the prerequisite for applying reliable firmographics, vertical segmentation, and buying center analysis across the market.

Case Study →

Custom verticals allowed us to segment the market the way our sales team actually operates. Instead of broad industries, we can focus sales territories on the specific segments where AlphaSense consistently sees the strongest pipeline and deal outcomes.

Sanah Ahmed

Director Global Sales Operations

Establishing accurate firmographics for reliable segmentation

Kernel also improved the reliability of core firmographics by combining its entity database with agentic verification. Because every account had already been resolved to a verified real-world organization, firmographic attributes such as headcount, industry classification, headquarters location, and revenue could be applied to the correct entity rather than to inconsistent CRM records.

Kernel’s agents then evaluate multiple primary sources to validate and refine these attributes, cross-checking signals across company websites, regulatory filings, public company information, and other structured sources. When conflicting data appears, agents reason across the evidence to determine the most credible value and record the logic behind that decision.

This combination of a clean entity foundation and agent-driven verification significantly improves the reliability of firmographic data. On evaluation subsets during implementation, AlphaSense observed meaningful accuracy improvements over legacy enrichment providers, with headcount accuracy improving by roughly 50% and industry classification accuracy by 30%.

Each firmographic attribute is written back with reasoning fields explaining how the value was determined, making the data transparent and auditable for RevOps. Instead of relying on opaque enrichment fields, teams can understand and trust the underlying evidence. This allows firmographics to become a reliable input for market segmentation, account list creation, and territory allocation, ensuring RevOps is making coverage decisions based on accurate company profiles.

Custom verticals: turning industries into high-value GTM segments

AlphaSense usesd Kernel to translate broad industries into the specific segments where sales performance consistently outperforms the average.

RevOps defined a vertical schema aligned to how the sales organization evaluates markets: a top layer of industries linked to NAICS, such as Financial Services, with deeper sub-verticals like investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, and asset management. While most datasets group these firms under a single industry label, they represent distinct markets with different buying cycles, budgets, and deal characteristics.

Kernel’s agents classify companies against this schema by analyzing how each organization actually operates: its products or services, positioning, and business model, as reflected on its website and public materials. Rather than assigning a generic industry tag, Kernel determines which sub-vertical best reflects the company’s role in the market and writes the reasoning behind the classification directly into the CRM.

Customizing verticals allows RevOps to align coverage with the segments where pipeline quality, deal size, and conversion outcomes are consistently stronger. SDR teams can generate focused account lists for private equity firms or hedge funds, territories can be carved around the segments that produce the most efficient sales cycles, and sales teams can concentrate effort on markets that reliably translate into revenue.

The result is a CRM structured around performance-driving market segments, allowing AlphaSense to deepen its vertical GTM motion and scale coverage around the parts of the market that deliver the strongest commercial results.

Case Study →

Kernel came to the rescue during territory planning and helped us get it right the first time. Instead of spending weeks fixing data and debating edge cases, RevOps could focus on building territories around the segments where we actually win.

Mityu Dinev

International Revenue Operations Lead

Key insight:
Headcount accuracy improved by roughly 50%, and industry classification accuracy by 30%.

Faster territory planning, TAM coverage, and higher revenue capacity per rep

Kernel was implemented and fully operational within four weeks of kickoff, allowing AlphaSense to enter territory planning with accurate, transparent data ready to support account allocation. RevOps was able to design territories and distribute books to SDRs and account executives using accurate entities, corrected hierarchies, reliable firmographics, and precise vertical segmentation.

This shift had an immediate operational impact. RevOps eliminated much of the manual work previously required to clean accounts, investigate duplicates, and resolve ownership disputes. Internal estimates suggested the team reclaimed approximately 20% of weekly time previously spent on reactive account data hygiene and research, allowing RevOps to focus on strategic coverage planning rather than data maintenance.

Improved entity resolution also surfaced over 5,000 duplicate accounts living outside of the RevOps’ organization hierarchy, preventing them from causing issues with territory creation. Kernel data also enriched over 10,000 accounts with stale or no SAM metrics, directly improving the quality of available accounts and unlocking additional revenue for the Sales team to go after.

These companies were pulled into the correct vertical account lists and allocated directly to SDR and AE territories.

By improving the quality of accounts assigned to sales reps, AlphaSense increased revenue capacity per rep by 15%, enabling more ambitious growth targets and greater net-new revenue potential. While not every account converts, Kernel has significantly increased the size and quality of the addressable pipeline assigned across the entire sales organization.

By consolidating enrichment, CRM hygiene, and segmentation into a single agentic entity data layer, AlphaSense simplified its GTM data stack while improving the accuracy of the data powering its sales motion. The result was cleaner territory books, more focused SDR outreach, and higher revenue potential per rep, all built on a foundation of entity-level accuracy rather than record-level enrichment.

Key insight:
By improving the quality of accounts assigned to sales reps, AlphaSense increased revenue capacity per rep by 15%.

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Founder sessions

Expert interviews

Documentation

Trust center

AlphaSense uses Kernel to operationalize vertical GTM and focus sales on high-growth sub-verticals

AlphaSense runs on Kernel

Kernel’s data accuracy exceeded our expectations. Having transparent reasoning behind every entity and firmographic attribute means I can actually trust the CRM without needing to constantly double-check and verify.

Introduction

Fixing the foundation: identity resolution, deduplication, and hierarchy correction

Custom verticals allowed us to segment the market the way our sales team actually operates. Instead of broad industries, we can focus sales territories on the specific segments where AlphaSense consistently sees the strongest pipeline and deal outcomes.

Establishing accurate firmographics for reliable segmentation

Custom verticals: turning industries into high-value GTM segments

Kernel came to the rescue during territory planning and helped us get it right the first time. Instead of spending weeks fixing data and debating edge cases, RevOps could focus on building territories around the segments where we actually win.

Faster territory planning, TAM coverage, and higher revenue capacity per rep

Read more stories

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