alva Announces Partnership with Ballast Research and Hamilton Place Strategies

Majority investment supported by Falfurrias Capital Partners

LONDON (July 26, 2021) – Today, alva, the leading stakeholder intelligence platform announced its partnership with Ballast Research and Hamilton Place Strategies (HPS). The partnership was supported by a majority investment in alva by Falfurrias Capital Partners (FCP), formalising the relationship between the leaders across corporate stakeholder management. The partnership and investment follows FCP’s earlier majority investments in Ballast Research and HPS.

Headquartered in London, UK, alva is a stakeholder intelligence platform that provides data-rich, real-time technology to companies across industries, including financial services, consumer, healthcare, and professional services. Built on award-winning Natural Language Processing technology, alva delivers the richest and most accurate insights based on the analysis of more than 25 million pieces of content every day across 100 languages, 150 countries, and over 500,000 different individual publications. Additionally, alva’s ESG Intelligence provides comprehensive analysis of how any company is performing against the SASB sector standard issues compared to their peer group.

The new partnership will enable a fully integrated business intelligence platform, providing singular consulting services that seamlessly combine primary research, data-driven reputational findings, advisory services, and monitoring capabilities.

“By combining the pre-eminent policymaker research firm in Ballast and the leading public affairs consultancy in HPS with alva’s technology and insights, we can produce unmatched reputational
predictability and decision-ready intelligence,” said alva’s Founder and CEO Alberto Lopez-Valenzuela. “With Falfurrias’s support, we look forward to creating the industry standard for value-creating stakeholder management.”

“To perform in the new stakeholder-centric environment, the leaders we serve need rich, actionable insights covering a broad range of sources, regions, and issues,” said Ballast Research President Mike Gottlieb. “alva allows us to immediately broaden our offering for today’s leading organisations and executives in the public, private, and social sectors, while also providing the technology and capabilities needed to further build on the vision we share with our colleagues at HPS.”

“alva created a powerful platform based on brilliant technology, and HPS and Ballast are thrilled to be working with them,” said HPS Partner Tony Fratto. “alva will immediately allow us to deliver global solutions in multiple languages. It’s exciting to bring together technology, analytics, and strategic insights to help companies deal with their complex, dynamic stakeholder relationships.”

“Ballast, HPS, and alva bring the industry’s best strategists and thinkers together to drive the next evolution of stakeholder reputation management,” said FCP Partner Geordie Pierson. “For a market that’s been traditionally fragmented, we believe we are collectively building a comprehensive suite of services that can address all of today’s reputational challenges by combining unique, objective data insights to complement first-class advisory services.”

Although each business will maintain its own independent service offerings, support across the partnering organisations will now include public affairs, media relations, crisis and issue management, research and analysis, political and regulatory risk analysis, global thought leadership, digital strategy, corporate reputation, creative content, and media monitoring and analysis.

About alva

We support our clients to make better decisions with Stakeholder Intelligence. We analyse millions of alternative data, including media, regulator, investor, government, public and NGO sources to help our clients better understand and connect with their stakeholders. We combine AI technology with sector expertise to provide a fully integrated intelligence solution to corporations, the investment industry and advisory firms covering ESG, risk, reputation, media and board intelligence.

About Ballast Research

For nearly a decade Ballast Research has provided direct feedback from senior policymakers through quantitative and qualitative research. Ballast clients including Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits and trade associations, leverage Ballast’s data-driven insights to validate impact, identify opportunities, and determine optimal strategy and investment for future success.

About Hamilton Place Strategies

Hamilton Place Strategies (HPS) is an analytical public affairs consulting firm. We work on complex issues in highly regulated industries, partnering with clients to advance their most important priorities. The firm was founded in 2010 by partners Tony Fratto and Stuart Siciliano.

About Falfurrias Capital

Operational Focus describes the way the Falfurrias team partners with management teams to leverage its significant, real-world experience to bring measurable contributions and to create lasting value in our portfolio companies. By partnering with the most respected experts in their fields, we immerse ourselves in your industry, identify the strongest growth opportunities, and rigorously test and learn using our expertise, data and tireless investigation. Contributions include technology-enabling a product or service, introducing new product lines through market research and proven strategies, and recruiting high-impact management teams — all with the goal of building lasting value.