Crunchbase, which has long offered a free database of PE/VC funded companies, is launching a subscription service called Crunchbase Pro. The new service helps users “discover new companies, people, and deals based on highly customizable search.” The new service was unveiled at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago.
Crunchbase was spun off of TechCrunch last year and now has a staff of sixty following a Series A round. The firm has trebled its revenue over the past year led by database extract revenue. They have also seen a ten-fold increase in customers.
Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell set a high objective for his firm. “If we can become the LinkedIn for companies or the Facebook for companies and help companies connect with one another, I think that is a really interesting challenge that can take us into the long term.”
The service lists core five capabilities:
- Identify prospective partners, customers, investors or investments
- Quickly see what matters most with Crunchbase Rank and Trending Score
- Conduct faster, deeper due diligence on new business deals
- Receive email alerts when there is activity that users care about
- Drill into search results to see the interconnections between entities as well as get quick analysis of market trends
Features include “multi-join dynamic searches” (a techie way of saying “list building with immediate results”), custom lists, shareable searches and lists, and CSV export. Alerts are provided for lists, saved searches, and user defined topics.
According to TechCrunch, the Trend Score for companies and VC firms “uses metrics like size of round, date of last financing, and profile page views to produce a ranking of these entities that changes with time.”
Crunchbase now covers a half million companies and 2,700 VC firms. 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.
The new service is free of advertising and available at an introductory price of $29 per month (billed annually). Next month the price rises to $49 per month. The pricing is aggressive with respect to sales intelligence vendors which generally run in the $100 to $150 per month range prior to volume discounts and well below the pricing of their PE/VC database competitors such as CB Insights, DataFox, and Mattermark.
John Mannes lauded the Pro service’s speed and usability in TechCrunch, “Side by side with comparable platforms like PitchBook, CB Insights, and Mattermark the new CrunchBase Pro is fast and simple. Nearly every task can be done from the main page and there is little to no lag, even on complex search queries. The new colorful design, taking a page from Google’s material design, is a huge improvement on its dimly lit predecessor.”
Pro is a standalone service, but Crunchbase plans on CRM connectors and integrating external data sources such as SimilarWeb, Glassdoor, Apptopia, Enigma, and Product Hunt. The firm gives the example of a job hunter searching for Glassdoor jobs using a combination of Crunchbase and Glassdoor data. Crunchbase also has search intent data for marketers on their roadmap. Intent data will provide “visibility into who has searched for their company or competitors.”
Clients include Bain & Company, Citibank, Deloitte and Microsoft.
Access to the database begins at $2,388 for the Premium service which is “perfect for short term projects and light usage.” Quarterly access is priced at $999. However, access is subject to strict viewing and download caps (see chart of monthly quota on left). Premium users also receive a restricted version of the search module which contains only standard firmographic selects. Premium account support is limited to emails.