Premialab Secures $220M from KKR to Boost Quantitative Investment Strategies

Editorial Team

Last updated 17-12-2025

3 min

Premialab secures $220 million investment led by KKR, with Balderton also participating.

Founded in 2016, the company addresses the lack of standardised data in QIS.

The KKR partnership will boost transparency, analytics, and execution capabilities with Eurex.

Premialab is seen as crucial in the rapidly growing quantitative investment strategy market.

KKR's investment marks its first Gulf move, highlighting systematic investing's expanding importance.

Premialab, which has made its home base in Dubai despite operating across several major financial hubs, has secured a hefty $220 million growth investment led by KKR. The deal also brings existing backer Balderton along for the ride, giving the company quite a tailwind as it pushes deeper into the world of quantitative investment strategies. And believe it or not, this market isn’t some niche corner—it’s tied to an estimated $800 billion in assets under management.

The company was founded in 2016 by Adrien Géliot and Pierre Trecourt, who spotted a gap in the QIS space: everyone was building strategies, but there wasn’t a proper independent standard for data, analytics or risk management. Premialab’s response was to gather information directly from major global investment banks and build a database that now features more than 7,000 strategies. That’s helped the platform become something of a reference point for institutions benchmarking performance or trying to make sense of systematic risk.

Géliot said the new partnership with KKR gives Premialab the resources to keep scaling—more transparency, deeper analytics, the whole works. Trecourt echoed that view, adding that the funding will help expand the company’s institutional reach and strengthen its execution product built with Eurex. I reckon that link-up with Eurex is quite telling; execution in this space has always been a bit of a faff, so anything that smooths out access is likely to catch the attention of asset managers.

KKR, for its part, seems convinced Premialab has carved out a category-defining role. Elliot Bell from the firm described the company’s data as “critical and differentiated”, pointing to rapid adoption of QIS strategies across a range of clients. Balderton’s Rob Moffat also chimed in, noting how Premialab has become essential for anyone touching QIS and hinting that this expansion could place the company among the big names in capital markets.

What stood out to me—maybe because of conversations I’ve had with founders around Arageek events—is how much appetite there still is for solid infrastructure in fintech. Startups often chase flashy ideas, but platforms like this remind us that the backbone of finance still needs building. On the flip side, the sector can be unforgiving, so choosing the right partners is spot on, even if the process can sometimes feel a bit… well, you know?

KKR is making the investment through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund III, marking the fund’s first move into the Gulf. The firm has already invested around $24 billion in tech-focused growth deals since 2016, building a large specialist team along the way. Those global networks don’t hurt either, especially for a company trying to scale in places as different as New York, Hong Kong and Sydney.

Advisers on the transaction included Rothschild & Co for Premialab, and A&O Shearman and Gibson Dunn on the legal side. It’s all fairly standard fare for a deal this size, but it does signal how seriously the industry is taking the rise of systematic investing—something that, frankly, isn’t going away anytime soon, even if some people are still a bit wary of algorithmic everything. Premialab, though, looks set to keep pushing, and they seem pretty chuffed to bits about the road ahead.

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