Lily Wolstenholme

Managing data and accounting for its value are different jobs. Why “what is our data worth?” is now a question every CFO needs to answer.

On 30 July 2026, GSK announced a deal with a British AI biotech called Relation Therapeutics worth up to $110 million. However, there was no drug, no clinical candidate and no molecule at any stage of development in the deal. What GSK agreed to pay for was the data, which was a proprietary biological dataset that Relation had been building for years and the capability to generate significantly more of it. Relation Therapeutics is a London-based AI biotech founded in 2020. Its core focus has...

Earlier this year, Morningstar completed the acquisition of the Center for Research in Security Prices from the University of Chicago for $365 million. If the name is unfamiliar, the thing itself is not: CRSP built one of the earliest comprehensive databases of US stock market returns and its indexes now serve as benchmarks for more than $3 trillion of US equities, including some of the largest and most widely held Vanguard funds. What Morningstar acquired was more than raw data, it was the...