Crunchbase: startup and funding data (licensed)
Crunchbase is a commercial database of private and public companies focused on the startup ecosystem: company profiles (founding year, industry, location), funding rounds (amount, date, stage), investors, acquisitions, and key people. It is one of the two standard vendor sources for startup and venture-funding characteristics, the other being PitchBook; the two are frequently used together in the same study. A paper we distill uses it: Hu & Ma draw startup characteristics (founding year, industry, location, funding rounds and amounts, investor count) from Crunchbase, and separately use PitchBook business descriptions for idea-novelty scoring.
- Cost: a limited free tier exists; research-grade bulk export and the full API require a paid Crunchbase Pro / Enterprise licence.
- Vendor: Crunchbase, Inc.
- Coverage: global, strongest for U.S. technology startups and venture funding; coverage thins for non-U.S. and non-tech firms and for earlier years.
Access (when licensed)
Section titled “Access (when licensed)”- REST API or bulk data export. Licensed users pull profiles, funding rounds, and investor records through the Crunchbase API (entity and search endpoints) or a bulk CSV/data export, keyed by Crunchbase’s permalink/UUID identifiers.
- Free tier is for lookup, not bulk research. The public website and the free tier allow individual lookups but rate-limit and cap bulk pulls; do not build a research panel off the free tier.
- API credentials are required for programmatic access. Keep any credentials in
.env, never hard-coded.
Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)
Section titled “Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)”These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.
- Crowd-sourced, self-reported entries. Much of Crunchbase originates from user and company submissions, so fields are unevenly populated and can be promotional or stale. Treat missing funding amounts as missing, not zero, and expect duplicate or merged company records.
- Selection toward funded, successful, U.S. tech startups. Companies that raise visible rounds and generate press are over-represented; failed or bootstrapped firms are under-covered. A sample built from Crunchbase presence is a survivorship/visibility-biased sample, not a census of startups.
- Undisclosed and rounded funding amounts. Round sizes are often undisclosed or reported as ranges/round numbers; the “total funding” field aggregates only what was disclosed. Do not treat it as audited capital raised.
- Date ambiguity. Founding dates and round announcement dates can differ from the actual close date and are sometimes only year-precise; be explicit about which date you use for timing.
- Merging with PitchBook double-counts. The two vendors overlap heavily but use different identifiers, round definitions, and amounts; a naive union double-counts rounds and conflicts on amounts. Dedupe on a deliberate match key and pick a precedence rule for conflicting fields.
- Schema and history changes. Crunchbase has changed its data model and API versions over time; a panel assembled across vintages can have inconsistent fields. Pin the API version and extraction date.
Reference: representative entities and fields
Section titled “Reference: representative entities and fields”| Entity | Representative fields |
|---|---|
| Organization | name, founded-on, category/industry, country/region, status |
| Funding round | announced-on, investment type/stage, money raised, currency |
| Investor | investor name, type, number of investments |
| Acquisition | acquirer, acquiree, announced-on, price (if disclosed) |
| Person | name, role, founder/executive affiliations |
Pull the specific entities and fields you need and record the API version and extraction date; field availability is uneven across firms and years.
Citation
Section titled “Citation”Cite the provider and database, e.g.: Crunchbase / Crunchbase, Inc., accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the entity universe, the fields used, the API version or export vintage, and the extraction date so the sample is reproducible.