Expert network market hits $3B in 2025 as buyer mix shifts toward corporate strategy

The expert network industry generated roughly $3B in revenue in 2025, according to Inex One's 2025 industry report, up from the $2B figure that had been the standard reference for years. The growth is uneven. A handful of players are compounding; one of the originals just walked away from public markets again; and the customer base has quietly tilted away from the hedge fund readership most outsiders associate with the category.

For a sector that built itself on serving buy-side analysts, the most interesting line in the report is the buyer mix: corporate strategy teams now outnumber hedge fund and PE buyers among the roughly 11,200 firms running expert calls, per Inex One. Per-call pricing held the USD 1,000 to USD 1,500 line through the year.

Who's growing

AlphaSense is the clearest winner of the year. The company closed a USD 650M Series E at a USD 4B valuation after integrating Tegus, the transcript library it acquired in 2024. The combined product, search across filings, broker research, and a deep call-transcript corpus, is the closest thing the category has to a software-revenue flywheel sitting on top of expert content.

Dialectica appeared on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies for the sixth straight year. Six consecutive appearances is rare in any sector and unusual for a services-heavy business. The Athens-based firm has built its position on a combination of geographic spread (offices across Europe, North America, and Asia) and a research-led service model that competes with Third Bridge more than with GLG.

Capvision expanded from its APAC base into EMEA in 2025. The geographic move matters because the firm's compliance posture in China was reset after the 2023 Capvision and Bain investigations; the EMEA push is, in effect, a diversification away from a single-jurisdiction risk concentration that several Western buy-side clients had flagged.

VisasQ launched AI Scout, an AI-driven expert matching tool, across the Japanese parent and its Coleman Research subsidiary in the US. The product targets the slowest part of the moderator workflow, expert sourcing, which is also the part where AlphaSense and Tegus are pushing hardest from the data side.

InnovateMR acquired Ivy Exec, extending a quantitative market-research firm into the qualitative B2B expert-network adjacency. Small deal, but a directionally interesting one: market research and expert networks have circled each other for a decade, and the boundaries are getting thinner.

Who's stalling

GLG shelved its second IPO attempt. The first was pulled in 2021. The second, prepared for 2024 to 2025 conditions, did not proceed; the firm has not given a public timeline for a third try. GLG remains the largest expert network by revenue, but a category leader sitting out two consecutive public-market windows while a private competitor (AlphaSense) raises at USD 4B is a signal worth reading.

The stall is not unique to GLG. Several legacy players have ceded share to firms that built around two specific pressures: AI-augmented sourcing and transcript-library subscription revenue. The economics of the traditional moderator-led call are under structural compression, even as call volumes hold.

Where the next USD 2B comes from

The per-call line at USD 1,000 to USD 1,500 is the ceiling on the legacy product. Pushing the category from USD 3B to USD 5B will not come from running more calls at higher prices. Four expansion vectors look credible:

Subscription transcript libraries. AlphaSense plus Tegus is the proof of concept. Recurring software revenue tied to a deep, searchable corpus is structurally more valuable than per-call billing. Expect more libraries from competitors and more partnerships with financial data providers.

EN-adjacent AI tooling. AI Scout is one example. Expert sourcing, transcript summarization, and automated first-read research notes all sit in this layer. The pricing model is not yet settled; per-seat SaaS, usage-based, and bundled-with-calls are all live.

Corporate-strategy adoption. The buyer-mix shift to corporate strategy teams (now the plurality) is the largest underappreciated change in the report. These buyers have different needs from hedge funds: longer time horizons, less compliance friction, more interest in vendor and channel research. They also pay differently, often through procurement, with annual contracts rather than per-call billing.

Regional expansion. Capvision's EMEA push and Dialectica's continued European compounding both point at this. The category has been US-revenue-dominant; the next USD 2B almost certainly draws more heavily from EMEA and APAC corporates.

What to ask next: how much of the USD 3B is software revenue versus per-call services, and what the gross-margin spread looks like between the two. Inex One's report does not break that out. The Series E disclosures and any future GLG S-1 will.