Building sales pipelines and closing revenue is a problem for organizations in all industries during both boom and bust periods. Prospecting can be aided by "account-based" intelligence or the study of potential clients. However, it necessitates contacts in divisions like business development, sales, and hiring and a complete, vetted source of information.
According to CEO Jager McConnell, this is why many firms rely on Crunchbase. Over the past 15 years, Crunchbase has transformed into an API-driven database of companies and financial reports, along with a growing journalism segment. Crunchbase's roots are in a homegrown effort by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington to index startups highlighted in TechCrunch articles.
According to McConnell, Crunchbase currently receives over 75 million unique visitors yearly and recently passed 60,000 paying users, with more than half of the Fortune 500 represented. As per McConnell, Crunchbase seeks to make it possible for prospectors to locate and interact with qualified accounts while raising awareness for businesses they want to research.
Crunchbase closed a $50 million Series D financing on the 20th of July that was oversubscribed and included participation from OMERS Ventures, Mayfield, and Emergence Capital. Alignment Growth headed the deal. Crunchbase had a post-money valuation of $150 million as of the closure of its Series C, according to CEO Jager McConnell, who declined to disclose the valuation but called it a "major up round."
Today's version of Crunchbase is primarily a research tool for sales teams. Entries provide information about a company's founding date, executives, funding, and debt rounds (and their contributors). In addition, Crunchbase plans that cost money unlocks information on competitors, history, and other topics.
A group of writers who work for Crunchbase cover investment rounds and other Crunchbase-related news at Crunchbase News. The central database is updated manually and automatically thanks to hundreds of collaborations and syndication agreements with sites like LinkedIn, Business Insider, and others.
According to McConnell, Crunchbase can shorten the time sales teams spend prospecting by drawing attention to businesses with "growth signals," such as funding rounds or rising product use. Recent platform updates have a discovery-focused approach, letting Crunchbase clients, for instance, uncover businesses that fit a profile by searching for regions or qualities like "diversity." Customer relationship management data in search highlights customers that might be new to a particular salesperson, while machine learning-powered recommendations highlight new clients and comparable businesses to explore.
Beyond discovery, McConnell called attention to Crunchbase's most recent advancements in qualification and tracking, such as a Chrome addon that provides context on studied accounts. In addition, customers of Crunchbase may now sync new accounts that fit their criteria to Salesforce and receive email notifications for "priority" accounts and lists, saved searches, notes, and tags for matches.
Regarding interaction tools, Crunchbase now displays searchable "decision-maker" contact information and interacts with Gmail and other email services. In addition, customers can use email templates that are automatically generated and pull relevant, tailored data on prospects of particular interest.
For McConnell, differentiation and unbridled ambition are essential to Crunchbase's future success. To achieve this, Crunchbase intends to introduce a Hubspot integration and improved machine learning-powered suggestions that identify accounts, contacts, and tasks about specific prospecting goals. Additionally, under development are more complex dashboards to assist users in monitoring the "effectiveness of actions" on Crunchbase, such as the annual recurring revenue (ARR) produced by opportunities on the platform.
About Crunchbase
Crunchbase was founded in 2007 by Michael Arrington. Crunchbase is a platform for researching both private and public companies, it offers software for intelligent prospecting that is driven by current company data.
Information about founding members and people in leadership roles, investments and fundraising, mergers and acquisitions, news, and industry trends are all included in Crunchbase. The Crunchbase website, which was first created to track startups, provides data on public and private businesses worldwide.
Crunchbase obtains its data from sources including the Crunchbase community, machine learning, the venture programme, and more. In addition, the Crunchbase database accepts information from the general public. Before being accepted for publishing, these submissions must first be registered, receive social validation, and frequently undergo a moderator review.
