What metrics do PE groups usually look for?
Hello all, I've been part of a hackathon recently to train AI models on financial metrics. It was lead by a PE firm, but because of NDAs we couldn't access some of the firm's data. I therefore looked into scraping it from the web. But here's the catch, as you may know, Pitchbook, Crunchbase, etc cost a lot.
Since the end of the hackathon, I've been thinking about this. As an engineer and researcher, I'd like to access the data for little, if not for free. This is why I've started scraping a lot of data publicly available on the web. I've looked into scraping shady pdfs hidden deep inside websites, legal documents publicly available, even got to estimate the number of costumers of several companies by aggregating data from all stores, etc
But since I have no finance background, I'm curious to find out what metrics I should focus on...
Any help is welcome!