He Built An AI-Powered Platform That Processed $1 Trillion In Transaction Volume And Was Later Acquired By Thomson Reuters

When Dan Wertman sat at his desk at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz, staring at a 500-page agreement for a multi-billion dollar deal, he wasn’t thinking about starting a company. He was trying to answer a simple question: Should his client accept term A or term B?

What Dan discovered next would eventually lead to the creation of one of the fastest-growing transactional data platforms—and to a recent acquisition by Thomson Reuters. In a recent interview on the Dealmakers Podcast, he recounts his entrepreneurship journey leading up to the deal.

Dan retraces his path through building, scaling, and raising financing for Noetica, meeting his cofounders, and learning how to differentiate in the crazy world of AI. He also talks about finding product-market fit and weighing the option of an acquisition vs. continuing on the hypergrowth trajectory.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Childhood That Didn’t Follow the Script

Dan’s story begins in Marlboro, New Jersey—a classic American suburb, complete with strip malls, a large public high school, and block kickball games. But his upbringing wasn’t typical. His was a family of immigrants from Canada and Australia. His father stayed home while his mother worked.

This was during the 80s and 90s, when fewer than 1% of dads were doing that. Dan grew up seeing what it meant to challenge norms early on. That exposure mattered. It normalized being different. It made standing out feel natural and, in many ways, planted the first seeds of entrepreneurship.

But the defining moment came much earlier—and much harder. Dan lost his mother in a tragic accident when he was just 10 or 11 years old. That kind of event reshapes everything. For some, it leads inward; for others, it fuels a forward motion toward productivity. Dan chose the latter.

He dove into learning—relentlessly. He developed resilience. And he built a mindset that would later define him as a founder: Adversity doesn’t define you—your response to it does.

From Government Dreams to Financial Markets

Dan’s early academic interests leaned toward government, a path that led him to the University of Pennsylvania. UPenn is a great program with a School of Arts and Sciences that allows students to explore a wide range of fields of study.

Dan was keenly interested in government and, for a while, considered going to the Hill. But one book changed everything. After reading Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, he became fascinated with finance and capital markets. That pivot led him to do a summer internship at BlackRock.

Eventually, Dan joined BlackRock as a full-time analyst, working on developing innovative financial products in credit markets—in particular, fixed-income markets—an experience that would later prove foundational.

Two key lessons emerged. Firstly, Dan learned how to innovate and validate new products. They were essentially securities products, but transferable to any type of product.

Dan also learned that product innovation requires constant iteration and feedback—a lesson that proved to be valuable for his future work at Noetica. Secondly, he developed an understanding of how markets function, their key players, and why they do what they do.

Again, these lessons would become a competitive advantage. They weren’t just theoretical insights; they became the building blocks for what would later become Noetica.

Law School, MIT, and Harvard Business School

Dan’s next move might seem like another detour—law school at Harvard. But it was anything but random. At BlackRock, he had been working with highly regulated products and became super interested in the financial regulation policy coming out of the Treasury.

Initially, Dan considered pursuing a JD/MBA, but then decided to attend law school only. While studying law, he immersed himself in entrepreneurship, breaking the record for the number of credits he could take outside of the law school at all the other schools in that area.

Soon, Dan was taking classes at MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School, including the investors class taught by Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital. Essentially, he was reverse-engineering startups before ever building one.

Here, Dan learned about launching technology ventures, taking classes to understand how to get from zero to one. He also wanted to explore the mistakes other founders made, just in case he decided to go down the path of entrepreneurship someday. He would know what not to do.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and the Power of Ideas

After graduating, Dan joined Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—one of the most prestigious law firms in the world and one of the best transactional firms in existence. Contrary to popular opinion, the firm is a very entrepreneurial place, famous for inventing the poison pill concept, as Dan discovered.

The poison pill concept has famously upended how corporate law is practiced today and ultimately changed an entire corporate legal industry. Here, Dan learned something very specific—meritocracy of ideas really wins.

As a first-year, he found himself working on a complicated spinoff. He approached a partner with a new idea for how it could be altered structurally. That idea actually ended up defining how the transaction played out.

This experience reinforced in Dan that if your ideas are good enough, you can build the appropriate consensus. He worked at Wachtell from 2017 to 2020, working on landmark transactions, such as:

• T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint
• UTC’s merger with Raytheon
• Allergan’s deal with AbbVie
• Neiman Marcus’ restructuring during COVID

Looking back at his educational journey, Dan underscores the advantages he gained from the crazy swings from BlackRock to law school to Wachtell. He benefited from the knowledge transfer and learning to apply lessons in situations that are completely unrelated. It helped him become a better founder.

The Insight That Sparked Noetica

His experiences at Wachtell taught Dan what it’s like for industries to be redefined by transactions, in particular through transformative combinations. He recalls the exact moment when the idea for Noetica first hit him.

Back at his desk as a third-year attorney working on high-power transactions, Dan was trying to evaluate a deal term by studying a 500-page, multi-billion-dollar agreement. He was evaluating whether he should push his client to accept term A or term B in the given context.

Dan did what any attorney would do. He asked a senior partner a simple question: “Where’s the database that tells me how this term typically looks and quantifies across deals?”

The answer? It didn’t exist. And it couldn’t exist—at least not with the technology available at the time. The technology to aggregate index terms in such agreements at scale just couldn’t do it. Contracts were unstructured. Data was locked inside documents. Extracting meaning at scale was impossible.

Until it wasn’t.

The AI Inflection Point

Fast forward to 2022. Dan saw early versions of language models—before consumer-grade GPT, and AI became mainstream. And he realized something profound: For the first time, machines could understand and interpret legal language at scale—in ways that originally only humans could.

That unlocked the original idea. Dan realized they could use language models to comb through vast quantities of transactional, merger, financing, and capital markets agreements—and index them at scale.

Anyone working on a transaction—whether a bank, investment manager, advisor, law firm, or issuer—can actually see how often these terms come up in these deals.

They could see the thresholds for the terms they should get in these deals, eliminating the guesswork and allowing them to zero in on what the market can support with data-backed certainty.

Building in a Market That Didn’t Yet Exist

In mid to late 2022, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion for investors that AI would be the next wave. In 2022, there was hype around crypto and smart contracts, which were attracting investment. AI? Not so much. Around this time, Dan built an incredible founding team.

When Dan left Wachtell, he partnered with Tom Effland, a Columbia PhD in AI and a leading scientist working on some of the most advanced language models. Dan also connected with Yoni Sabag, a management consultant at Deloitte.

Together, they realized that the data had immense value as long as they could aggregate and index it.

The Massive Market Opportunity

Dan explains how Noetica has scaled exponentially over the past 3+ years, working with the vast majority of top platforms. Noetica processed $1T in transaction volume through the platform last year, making it the fastest-growing transactional data platform in the market today.

Dan and his team have built the largest database of deal terms in existence, with over a billion terms. The database is so incredibly extensive that users can actually pinpoint the data behind the transactions. And that’s something a young associate at Wachtell could never do before in the US.

As Dan explains, the underlying market was enormous. The capital markets ecosystem represents roughly $50T in global trading volume, making it the world’s largest market. It’s growing rapidly at a massive double-digit CAGR.

Dan points out that this market is broken down into five major participants, such as:

• Companies of all sizes that access capital markets and execute transactions.
• Advisors, including law firms, capital markets consultants, and banking advisory firms
• Banks, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs—institutions that are underwriting the deals
• Investment managers, such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and Vanguard
• Hedge funds and traders

Each of these participants relies on data sets, whether it’s FactSet, Bloomberg, financial data sets, credit data sets like S&P and Moody’s, and fund data sets like Morningstar and Limber.

Further, each of them needs to review the contract or agreement underlying the security. This contract can be a credit agreement, indenture, prospectus, or preferred designation.

Basically, it is a document that governs the rights and obligations of a security each time it is issued, whether in M&A, capital markets, or financing. And nobody had indexed that data at scale. Noetica changed that.

Monetizing Noetica

As Dan explains, if you build out a data set that aggregates data from all the agreements in the market, you monetize it exactly the same way you would any financial data set. Noetica now has the largest database in existence and is the fastest-growing transactional data platform in the market.

Dan and his team started working with major law firms to test it. Their validation provided the early product-market fit. Today, the platform includes:

• Over 1 billion indexed deal terms
• More than $1T in annual transaction volume processed
• A rapidly growing footprint across major institutions

Product-Market Fit: Starting Narrow, Scaling Fast

Noetica’s early product-market fit strategy was focused: Start with top law firms as design partners. As Dan sees it, in the early days of iterating the product with early customers, you need to think about what the ultimate fit will be.

“Then you have to just double down and triple down on that product over and over and over again,” he says. Later, you can grow into other areas as well.

The law firms in the transactional space provided immediate feedback on how this dataset could be highly valuable to their practices. The early traction on some of those design partnerships gave Dan and his team significant confidence that they were on the right track.

As a result, they doubled down on the product-market fit, and the impact became undeniable. By late 2023, many of the 10 top-tier firms had begun discussing Noetica. “This completely changed how we executed the transaction,” they reiterated.

Raising Funding for Noetica

Ironically, when Dan started fundraising, AI wasn’t the hot trend. Investors were still focused on crypto and blockchain, asking the same question: “How does this relate to smart contracts?” It didn’t. And that was the point.

Dan had conviction that AI—not crypto—would reshape this space. His earlier experiences with VCs and investors had taught him that in the investor community, it takes real foresight to see where markets are headed, rather than where they have been. That conviction would eventually pay off.

Dan’s background in finance and investing had taught him that fundraising is a by-product of product quality, customer value, and a top-notch team. When Noetica was ready for its pre-seed round, Dan reached out to a contact at BlackRock.

His question: “Who are the five best pre-seed investors that I should talk to?” The answer? Bling Capital’s Ben Ling. Ben immediately understood the vision and led the round. From there, momentum built quickly.

Drawing on his experience in credit markets since 2022, Dan explained to early investors that these markets were advancing so rapidly that private credit would become a multi-trillion-dollar asset class in the next five years.

This segment is going to need a massive infrastructure from the software and data perspectives—far larger than what exists today. And Noetic will be at the forefront of that for documentation.

The platform had achieved ideal product-market fit and was beginning to scale rapidly when Dan approached Lightspeed Venture Partners for a seed funding round. The business was growing so fast that they preempted the next round, just 9 to 10 months later.

The lesson? When the fundamentals are strong, capital follows. Prior to the acquisition, Dan and his team had raised $29M for Noetica.

Storytelling is everything that Dan was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

The Acquisition Decision: Scale vs. Acceleration

At peak growth, Noetica faced a classic founder dilemma. Dan and his team could raise another round and continue scaling independently. Or, join forces with a strategic acquirer, Thomson Reuters, that came in with a compelling proposition.

By the time Thomson Reuters approached them, Noetica was signing up several huge institutions. Reliance on its datasets was increasing rapidly.

Dan and his team were releasing many interesting features, and Noetica had just started scaling out to investment managers and corporations. The momentum was off the charts and attracting attention from investors and potential acquirers.

Dan’s future vision for Noetica was to build the best term data sets in existence and really upend the transactional market ecosystem with them, bringing data-driven decisioning to these transactions that had never existed before.

But when Dan and his team discussed the opportunity with Thomson Reuters, they realized that by joining forces, they could achieve much more.

The Thomson Reuters ecosystem would accelerate everything they wanted to do with the product, team, and overall vision, and change how these transactions really operated. Thomson Reuters has incredible market-leading products in the legal and financial spheres.

Their ecosystem includes Westlaw, HighQ, CoCounsel, Practical Law, risk products, and more. These platforms are pulling decades of proprietary data and content that has been aggregated at scale.

Dan could see that bringing Noetica technology into the ecosystem to utilize those data sets would enhance everything they did with transactional data. It was a perfect fit and an amazing opportunity to accelerate Noetica’s vision.

Thomson Reuters’ vision was to bring market-aware AI to every M&A lawyer, financing lawyer, investment manager, and corporation in that ecosystem. The idea got Dan super excited.

Lessons for Founders

Dan’s journey offers several sharp, actionable insights:

Trade Cash for Time

Speed compounds advantage and is the most important thing to optimize. Saving money at the cost of speed is often the wrong trade. The faster you can do everything, the more advantage you can gain, and the more market dominance you can create. The cash is paid back at much higher multiples later.

Dan recalls how many of their decisions in the early days were more to preserve capital at the expense of time—a bad trade, in retrospect.

Make Bigger Bets

Hedging limits upside. Founders are constantly calculating risks, rewards, and the expected value of certain decisions. Sometimes the tendency is to hedge in certain areas or on certain projects.

But if you trust your judgment, you’ll build impactful products. In every case, it makes sense to take bigger swings and larger bets. Conviction-driven decisions create outsized outcomes. Noetica is a great example—it has an amazing window into deal terms.

Dan explains further. Noetica has a rich alternative data set hidden within 500-page transactional agreements that no one can quantify except its software. This factor reflects the anxieties and the optimism of transactional counterparties, buyers and sellers in M&A, lenders and borrowers in credit markets.

At Noetica, they track on the platform spikes and troughs of things that are good for acquirers and bad for lenders, and good for borrowers and bad for sellers. That is a super unique window into the mindset of the US economy.

This window enables them to detect market trends earlier than public markets. They can see trends during deal negotiations because they can see the documentation itself.

Leveraging the Noetica Platform

For a long time, Dan and his team avoided making market calls based on this data. They hesitated to make decisions based on the dataset—a hedge. They didn’t want to make the market call and realize it was the wrong one. That thinking changed in October 2025.

That’s when they detected large spikes in certain protections in credit transactions on the platform. That was an indication that lenders were getting nervous about distress in the private credit markets.

Thus, Dan published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October titled “The Private Credit Winter Is Coming.” He specified that the data they were seeing on the platform indicated that lenders’ smart money is preparing for more distress than the markets are currently pricing in.

As predicted, by the end of 2025, there were massive outflows in private credit markets—a huge amount of turmoil. Today, many of these markets have lost a ton of value, which Dan knew was coming because the deal term signaled it.

They were too hedged in during prior cycles to announce that in the market. By making the bull call in advance, Noetica received many inbound calls from investment managers and major law firms.

They wanted to know how to use the dataset to help clients secure better deals and make better investment decisions. Dan’s takeaway? Make bigger bets with solid judgment behind them. Any founder who considers that will probably be happy that they did so.

Final Thought

Dan Wertman didn’t start with a grand vision to disrupt capital markets. He started with a question. A missing dataset. A frustration. And a willingness to pursue it when technology finally made it possible. That’s often how the most important companies begin. Not with answers—but with better questions.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Adversity early in life can build the resilience that fuels entrepreneurial drive.
• Cross-disciplinary experiences create unique advantages when building companies.
• The best startup ideas often come from firsthand frustration with broken systems.
• Timing matters—AI unlocked what was previously impossible in data extraction at scale.
• Product-market fit comes from starting narrow and doubling down with early customers.
• Fundraising follows strong fundamentals, not the other way around.
• Founders win by trading cash for speed and making bold, conviction-driven bets.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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