Last week was a busy week for VC funding in the SalesTech space. Yesterday, I covered SparkLane’s funding round and today I am blogging about PE/VC database Crunchbase which announced an $18 million Series B led by Mayfield. The funding announcement was paired with the launch of a new team-based Crunchbase Enterprise service. Crunchbase was spun out of AOL in 2015 with $6.5 million in funding from Emergence Capital followed by a smaller $2 million round. Crunchbase also laid out plans for a Crunchbase Marketplace that would allow the company to become the “Facebook of company information.”
The new funds will be dedicated towards extending its SaaS offerings, expanding its database, and growing its teams with a “significant commitment to diversity.”
“Mayfield is excited to partner with Jager McConnell and the team at Crunchbase to be the place where consumers, professionals, and businesses can easily access the information on companies to sell to, market to, partner with, finance, work for, research, acquire, and do business with. The early success of Crunchbase Pro and its usability have given us a view into the ambitious vision and roadmap of increasing the breadth, depth, and accessibility of the high-quality data platform Crunchbase is creating,” commented Rajeev Batra, Partner at Mayfield. “Crunchbase not only has a globally dominant position and brand, it has the potential to be a true platform company in becoming the actionable master record for company data.”
Crunchbase now offers an API along with three levels of service: free, Pro ($29 / month), and Enterprise ($99 / user / month with a minimum of five users). Additional services are in the pipeline.
The free service receives 2.3 million unique visitors per month of which 40% of site traffic is international. Pro, which was launched last September, is “well past” 5,000 subscribers according to CEO Jager McConnell. The firm has licensed its API to more than ten partners including Glassdoor and SimilarWeb.
The new Enterprise service combines Pro with API access, list downloads, email addresses, phone support, and a CRM connector. The AppExchange service supports daily Crunchbase updates and data change alerts.
Crunchbase now covers a half million companies and 2,700 VC firms. Other content includes investors, people, events, and products. Data is maintained by a team of editors with updates provided to Crunchbase by their member community. The database also benefits from VC firm updates and machine learning tools which search for anomalous information. Annually, five million updates are made to the database.
Crunchbase has become the go-to destination for accurate and up-to-date company information for businesses all over the world,” said McConnell. “As we grow, hiring a diverse team will bring a variety of valuable perspectives into the business, which reflects the culture of Crunchbase. This will remain a focus of hiring as the company doubles in size in the next year.”
Crunchbase clients include Affinity, Datafox, Datanyze, Deloitte, Engagio, Everstring, Infer, Microsoft, Nestle, Samsung, Slack, Target, Volkswagen, and IBM Watson. The firm has forty staff of which 43% are women and half are non-white.
McConnell wants Crunchbase to be the Facebook of company information. “The premise is: it would be impossible for a single company to find all these slivers of company information, and put it into one spot on their own. They can’t be all those core competencies, so the idea is, let’s go and form these partnerships with all these companies that have those core competencies, put it in one place and, if we do a good job here, the user will say, ‘I know where to go, it’s where all this data comes together, that’s at Crunchbase.’”
To accomplish this vision, Crunchbase is readying a Crunchbase Marketplace of fifteen to twenty partners “to build a true company master record.” Thus, Glassdoor would provide CEO ratings, employee ratings, and available jobs while SimilarWeb would feature website traffic for a specific company or industry.
Users will have the ability to select which content sets display. The goal is to cover all of the companies on the Internet.
“Over time, pretty much every data provider that has some slice of company information, we’d like our users to have the ability to go and add that data directly into their experience. Sometimes that will be free, like Glassdoor will be a free dataset, but other times it may even cost a little bit of money to go add in technology stack data, or patent data,” said McConnell. “Sometimes people want to know not just about funding, but about jobs, the CEO or all the companies in their geography that have a certain amount of website traffic. Or sales reps want to find people who use a competitive product. Right now, they need three partners to get all that data. We want to let you choose it as part of the experience.”
David Sternis of Deloitte said, “The quality and accessibility of Crunchbase data is second to none. We save an immense amount of time by using Crunchbase Enterprise to power our TechHabor solution in order to stay on top of the innovation and startup landscapes. Our teams spend a fraction of the time they used to on research and market analysis and can prioritize focusing on providing strategic recommendations for our clients.”
Note: While Crunchbase and CB Insights both cover the PE/VC space, they are separate, non-affiliated companies.