How to Use Crunchbase Rank & Trend Score to Find Influential Companies & Market Trends

Crunchbase data changes rapidly. New companies start up, new products are launched, new rounds of funding are announced. People change jobs. To help users prioritize the profiles in their lists and searches, Crunchbase Pro provides users with two specialized tools to leverage this dynamic information: Crunchbase Rank and Trend Score.

How It Works: Crunchbase Rank

In Crunchbase, the top 100,000 profiles in each industry (i.e., Companies, Investors, Funding Rounds, Acquisitions, etc.) are assigned a ranking called Crunchbase Rank.

Upgrade to Crunchbase Pro to use Crunchbase Rank and identify companies growing rapidly.

Crunchbase Rank is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the number of connections of a profile within the platform, the amount of community engagement, funding events, news articles, acquisitions, and more. These factors decay over time at varying rates depending on the factor (i.e., news decays more quickly than size of funding rounds).

The benefit of Crunchbase Rank is it lets users prioritize their search results by influence. The higher the Rank, the more influential the profile is compared to its peers. The lower the Rank, the less important the profile is to the community.

A simple search for companies with a Rank less than ten returns the top ten most highly ranked companies to the Crunchbase platform. You would likely recognize companies like Facebook, Alibaba, Github, etc.

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How It Works: Trend Score

A company’s Rank isn’t permanent. Events such as product launches, funding events, leadership changes, and news affect a company’s Crunchbase Rank. When events like these happen, it signifies a trend.

While Rank shows context, Crunchbase Trend Score demonstrates activity. As a company moves up or down in Rank, its Trend Score is impacted. Trend Score measures the rate of a company’s activity on a 20-point scale. Scores closer to +10 mean it’s moving up in rank much faster compared to their peers. Scores closer to -10 means it’s moving down.

For example, a company that announces its first funding round will likely experience a jump in its Rank, pushing its Trend Score up as its page views, article counts, funding amount, team members, etc., begin to increase.

Add Trend Score to your search to capitalize on developing trends.

Now that we’ve looked at what Rank and Trend Score are and how they work, let’s look at some examples.

  1. Prioritize a Sales Prospect List

A digital agency has developed real estate software they’d like to sell to established real estate companies in the United States that have not undergone much digital innovation.

Here’s their Crunchbase Pro search:

  • Industry group: Real Estate
  • Headquarters location: United States
  • Total funding amount: greater than $30 million
  • Founded date: before 2008

Crunchbase Pro search: Real estate companies in the United States with over $30 million in funding.

The search criteria generates 136 companies.

To prioritize their outreach plan, they look at Crunchbase Rank to see the best target companies listed in ascending order. The agency believes their software can benefit both the companies at the top and middle of this list the most.

Their logic is this: the more known and recognized a company (the lower its Rank number), the more likely they would have bigger budgets and teams, and therefore would be able to afford the agency’s software. They also include companies in the middle of the list as these companies might be easier to access.

They click the statistics and identify the average as 11,587.

See statistics with Crunchbase Pro: Average Crunchbase Rank of U.S. Real Estate Companies with Over $30 million in funding

Finally, they add an additional search filter to show only the companies with a Rank less than 11,587 resulting in a more manageable list of 62 companies. They save this list and begin outreach. In this scenario, the agency used Crunchbase Rank to prioritize prospects by greater chances of success.

  1. Find your next investor

Another example is an entrepreneur looking for a venture capital firm on the East Coast to invest in her advertising software company. She wants a well-established, well-respected firm that makes a higher number of investments.

Here’s her Crunchbase Pro search:

  • Headquarters region: East Coast
  • Portfolio Companies: Software and Advertising
  • Number of Investments greater than 100
  • Crunchbase Rank less than 1,000

Search for Investors with Crunchbase Pro and filter with Crunchbase Rank

She added the Crunchbase Rank filter (of less than 1,000) to narrow her search to the top 1% of venture capitalists in her market segment. It helped her find the twelve top-ranked VCs for her particular startup.

  1. Discover investment opportunities

A small venture capital firm wants to lead a seed round for an up-and-coming, yet still undiscovered gaming startup in the United States.

Here’s their search:

  • Industry group: Gaming
  • Headquarters location: United States
  • Total funding amount: less than $100,000
  • Trend score (30 days): greater than or equal to 2

The criteria generated a list of 14 companies.

Little known gaming companies in the US

The VC firm wants to lead a seed round so they qualified companies with only a small amount of funding from friends and family or angel investors. They also selected a Trend Score of greater than 2 because they want startups that are building connections fast and growing quickly.

  1. Diversify your portfolio

An analyst at a VC firm is tasked with finding media and entertainment startups located outside the coastal tech hubs (NYC and SF) and founded by female entrepreneurs who have raised funding and worked previously at Google, Amazon, or Apple.

Here’s the search:

  • Industry group: Media and entertainment
  • Founders: Female founders
  • Total funding amount: Greater than or equal to $1,000,0000
  • Headquarter location: not in San Francisco or New York, but must be in the United States

Media and entertainment companies with female founders

The search returns 247 companies.

The analyst shares this list with one of the principals at the company. The principal responds, “Have any of these companies been in the news recently?”

“Hold on,” says the analyst. The analyst adds a Trend Score filter of greater than 2 in the last 7 days. A positive Trend Score means the company’s Rank increased from expanded activity on its profile. The added filter yields nine positively trending companies:

The analyst shows Pixability and Dreamscape Immersive to his boss. “Let’s start with those two,” says the principal.

Find new companies and investors with Crunchbase Rank and Trend Score

From these four examples, you’ve seen how Crunchbase Rank and Trend Score can be used to quickly identify prominent players (or less prominent players) and take advantage of market trends.

Now it’s your turn. Use these two specialized tools to generate more targeted search results based on context and activity. Search or sort by Rank to prioritize based on influence and assess a company’s level of activity using Trend Score.


Feel free to reach out to us with any questions at feedback@crunchbase.com. Check back here soon to learn more about other Crunchbase Pro tools.

Follow Dave Schools on Twitter @daveschoools.

  • Originally published November 3, 2016, updated March 8, 2024