Investors are in the business of betting on winners. But those winners are hard to spot, particularly at a private company’s early stages.

Some investors are now turning to software and data analytics to try to identify promising companies on the cusp of taking off and put money into them while there is still time to make a big profit.

That’s the impetus behind Hubble, a software program for investors that has been under development at Arlington-based Disruption Corp. The company announced Thursday that is has added its largest customer yet, Owings Mills-based investor Greenspring Associates.

“Everybody is looking for the proverbial unicorn and no one knows how to find it,” said Disruption founder and chief executive Paul Singh. “What I’m hoping is our platform, our products, our services help people spot those wrong decisions before they ever make them.”

Spotting wrong decisions is not the same as identifying the right ones. Investors pass all the time on up-and-coming companies that turn out to be runaway success stories. And often, companies that seem promising at the start fail to realize their full potential.

Still, Singh sees an opportunity for private market investments to become more like their public market counterparts. Though there is still risk and unpredicability in the public markets, financiers can make more informed decisions about when and how much to invest in a public company based on hard data.

When it comes to public companies, regulators require managers to disclose all manner of information, from revenue and income to executive pay and liabilities. By comparison, the data available on private companies is far less abundant and accurate.

Disruption’s Hubble software pulls data from three key sources, Singh said. It culls any available information from publicly available resources, such as Web sites, regulatory filings and social media. The company also has analysts who research emerging sectors and share their findings.

The third tranche of data comes from the investors and limited partners, those who provide money to the investors, who can use Hubble to store, sort and analyze the information that their portfolio companies report to them.

“Obviously there’s always going to be holes in the data. It’s important for us to be directionally accurate, not specifically accurate,” Singh said.

Greenspring Associates, the company’s latest customer, has invested more than $3 billion since it was founded 15 years ago. The company acts primarily as a limited partner, but also invests directly into companies.

Managing General Partner Ashton Newhall said using software to analyze the thousands of companies it has funded, either directly or indirectly, can help the firm to identify which of its venture funds show the most promise and which companies are worth making an additional investment.

“There’s more deals than ever for a limited partner to look through,” Singh said. “They’re looking for technology to scale their own operations.”