Crunchbase: The business software that makes -‘silently- millions

By Rebecca Szkutak

For most venture capitalists, Crunchbase is the “mother” of free data for start-ups and Venture Capitals funds. controlling valuations and total financing without the paywalls of its competitors such as PitchBook and CB Insights.While this aspect of the company is the best known – and is expected to drive 80 million visitors to the platform in 2022 – Crunchbase has evolved in a business information database for private and public companies.

Crunchbase has created and upgraded its own in-depth sales software that uses its database to make it easier for B2B companies to find potential customers. The more companies that benefit from the software, the better it is at recommending leads. The idea came from CEO Jager McConnell, who had been thinking about the project for more than a decade and had tried to create it while under license from Salesforce. Instead of building the database from scratch, Crunchbase gave it the perfect starting point.

Taking the reins in 2015, McConnell imagined that Crunchbase could be turned into a Spotify or LinkedIn for companies. “I have Spotify in mind as a ‘next-generation’ consumer software,” McConnell told Forbes. “It puts you in a box with similar users. You learn about other types of music that the band listens to, you look for them and you find great music. This is not the case in the business world, when it should be.” Today, his creation has tens of thousands of paid customers and gathers double-digit millions in ARR (Medium Performance Method), according to the Midas Touch newsletter. A completely different picture from the situation the company was in six years ago.

When McConnell took over as CEO in 2015, the platform seemed neglected. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington launched the start-up database in 2007 as part of a tech news site to track the companies it covered, but it was never a priority. “It was always sidelined, the data was ‘foamy’, outdated,” McConnell notes. Crunchbase sprang from TechCrunch and its last owners, AOL and Verizon, with McConnell in attendance. He had a year and a half to set up a team, develop the software and start selling it. The project was funded by a $ 8.5 million round led by Emergence Santi Subotovsky. And so far, it is bearing fruit.

Crunchbase subscription software now has more than 60,000 users, bringing the company a whopping $ 38 million in ARR by the end of 2021. 87% of that is due to the latest version of the software – by looking at three levels – launched by the platform last July. The company also saw the licensing service bring more than 6 billion API requests to its database. “If we develop excellent software for the prospects of the world’s top companies as well as emerging companies, we will have created ‘next generation’ software,” McConnell said. “And that is our goal today.” The company declined to disclose its current valuation and whether it is profitable or not.

Creating a sales search software may not “discover the wheel,” but our approach is different, says McConnell, because of the Crunchbase database. which companies are growing and which are not through funding rounds – the “strong point” of the platform – how many employees each has and how many have been laid off. “For us, finding the right company to be your future customer is based on which companies were your best customers in the past,” McConnell explains. .

Chat Metrics, a Melbourne-based company B2B chat software that helps businesses find customers using traffic data, has seen a 400% increase in sales meetings since it launched Crunchbase. Chat Metrics CEO Terry Wilson tells Forbes that the software offers a combination of tools – email templates, verified corporate contact information and integration with Salesforce – that the start-up would have to pay 10 times as much to use separately. .

For Kyle Rasmussen, Chat Metrics’ chief revenue officer and the company’s sole sales representative, Crunchbase software is vital. “We probably save a day or two a week from finding out who to turn to, we can do that in minutes,” he says. “Ever since we started using Crunchbase, even meetings are different, since the first impression that is created on the participants in these conversations is that” these guys here have done their research “.

According to McConnell, Crunchbase now aims to optimize its existing data and add more features and filters to help its customers – such as seeing a breakdown of the type of jobs companies are moving to. hiring, instead of a simple number of employees, but also other – more creative – ways that will capture the growth dynamics of a company. Crunchbase looks forward to a new round of financing in 2022, which will add to the $ 56.6 million in funding it has raised to date, and hopes to maintain its growth momentum. “The whole thing pays off,” says McConnell. “We created this machine and we sell it. We really focus on the target user. We will probably reach 80 million users by 2022.”

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