The View from the Office.
I met David Barboza in midtown at the offices of WireScreen, a company he co-founded with Lynn Zhang in 2019. It was late afternoon, so I had an espresso and snacked on some nuts.
David is a former New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize. He spent two decades at the paper, covering the stock market and Chicago before moving to China in 2004. He was Shanghai bureau chief from 2008 to 2015.
WireScreen grew out of a passion for China and a realization that there was a huge opportunity to provide data about the country because information about global business is increasingly important and hard to get.
WireScreen is a bit like a Dun & Bradstreet database for China. It has fundamental information on 12 million companies and 25 million people. You can look up, for example, owners, management, stakeholders, key suppliers and customers.
The database is both deep and wide. It cross indexes investors, companies and suppliers, providing an ability to evaluate supply chain risk and fulfill a basic business requirement to “know-your-customer.”
The company has raised a total of $18 million from venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Harpoon Ventures. As part of the latest round of financing, PitchBook valued WireScreen at about $70 million.?
So far, WireScreen has focused on selling to government agencies, multinational corporations, law firms and regulators. David said that in the future they may consider expanding to sell information to the financial industry.
David said the key challenge hasn’t been procuring the data so much as “entity resolution,” which means accurately identifying which companies and people are cited in public filings and determining their connections.
I first met David in 2018. I was working as a product head at Bloomberg at the time. He visited the office to kick around an idea about providing news and information on China.
Six years later, here we are.
I congratulated him on how far he’s come.
He said there is still a long way to go.
David can be reached on LinkedIn or for a warm intro DM me.
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