Crunchbase Pro launches at TechCrunch Disrupt!

One year ago today, we announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that Crunchbase was spinning out to become a standalone company. What many people don’t know is only 10 minutes before, we had a secret all hands meeting in some collapsing part of Pier 70. The topic was only briefly that the spinout was official – the more important thing was what we were going to do at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2016. We were going to launch Crunchbase Pro.

In the weeks and months that followed, we had to rethink everything – from how we actually built product, to architecture, to design, to data. We knew we couldn’t build this without listening closely to our 25M users. We had countless focus groups where we heard our customers say how important it was that we not only improve the user experience for everyone but that we create tools that everyone can take advantage of.

One of the big surprises for me joining Crunchbase was all of the various use cases of how people use our data. Only about 7% of our users are venture capitalists looking for companies to invest in. You’ll find many users researching which customers to partner with, to acquire, to purchase from, to work for. Some are entrepreneurs trying to find investors who might be interested in their company. Others are looking for market trends or analyzing industry data. Crunchbase is a fascinating cross section of primarily business users at a scale more common for consumer applications. When we spoke to them, it became very clear – Crunchbase users were demanding a way to find the people, investors, and companies they didn’t know about.

And that’s exactly what we built.
After a year of being in stealth mode it’s so exciting to reveal everything we’ve been up to. Please forgive the epic long blog post to share it all with you.

Today we’re announcing Crunchbase Pro, a powerful discovery and search tool built on top of the Crunchbase platform you already know and love. That means that if a certain type of company, investor, or person is important to you you’ll be able to find it.

Here’s some of the stuff we’re particularly proud of:

Search: The foundation of Crunchbase Pro is the search architecture that we built from scratch. Just to nerd out for a second, you can have up to 25 different filters and up to 9 joins across all of the related records that you’re searching for. In other words, you can find companies like you’ve never been able to before with any tool. You would have needed direct access to our database to do what you’re now able to do in Crunchbase Pro. Here are some pretty cool examples we’ve made free for everyone. And it’s fast. So fast.

crunchbase-pro-search

Custom Lists: Another feature we’ve added are custom lists. This is a lot like the old “Following” functionality in Crunchbase but on steroids. If you’ve been using “My Follows” in the past, we’ve converted it into a custom list for you. That means whatever you are tracking in Crunchbase is now private just to you – no one will know what you’re following unless you tell them.

crunchbase-pro-notificationsNotifications: For both saved searches and custom lists, we built an incredibly powerful notification system. We’ll let you know when new entities match your searches, or if there are funding events, acquisitions, funds raised, news events, or IPOs for the companies in your searches and lists. You’ll have complete control over how often and for which events you will be notified.

Sharing: Something you’ve never seen before is the ability to make your lists and searches public. In Crunchbase Pro, you can now share every query you come up with or every list of companies you think are important. And we don’t just mean you can share them with other Crunchbase Pro users. You can post them on Twitter. You can put them in a blog post you’re writing. You can send them to anyone and even people without a Crunchbase Pro account can see the first 50 results. Got a top 20 list for companies you think are important? Share it. See emerging companies in a certain industry you want to talk about? No problem. Rather keep everything private so no one can access it? That’s fine too. You decide.

Columns, Sorting, and Exporting: As you’d probably guess, you can add whatever columns you want to your search results, sort in whichever way you like, and export results to Excel if you’d rather work with the data in another tool.

Analytics and Statistics: Sometimes you’d like to know the Total, Average, Minimum, Maximum, or Median is across all columns that include numbers and for every row of data we have. Want to know what the median series A investment was in Financial Services companies over the last 90 days? Check it out.

Crunchbase Rank and Trending Score: Something that makes Crunchbase special is that we’re not just a database of companies. We’re a destination – which means we have a lot of data around what companies, people, and investors are looked at the most, connected to the most, and trending the most. We’ve decided to expose that to our Crunchbase Pro users through Crunchbase Rank and Trending. Crunchbase Rank allows you to see which companies are currently the most important to our community. We expose the rank of the top 100,000 and we look at pageviews, follows, funding events, news articles, acquisitions, and a lot more. As companies move up or down, that impacts their Trend Score, which is a 20 point scale. Scores closer to +10 mean they’re moving up in rank faster much compared to those of their peers. Scores of -10 means they’re moving down. There’s a whole blog post coming about how these things work, and this should give you new way to search and sort your results in Crunchbase to see which are the more popular entities that match your criteria.

User Interface: You’ll also notice right away that we’ve given our UI a complete overhaul. We’ve taken design cues from Google Material design which means the tool should be both intuitive and beautiful. We’ve simplified our logo and applied this styling across our site. We have a lot of plans to make Crunchbase even better – but we hope you like our first step in making the interface cleaner and easier to use.

Something for everyone: During our focus groups we asked about pricing too. There were plenty of people who would pay a lot for the tool described above. But we heard people wanting us to democratize a tool like this just like we democratized the data – so that’s what we did. We picked a price point that puts (what we think is) the most powerful, easy-to-use discovery engine into your hands. We hope this will give value to every one of our users and open up a new world of possibilities on the Crunchbase platform.

Data: It doesn’t matter how good the application is, if it’s not sitting on top of amazing data, it’s useless. We’ve spent the last year quadrupling down on data. There’s another whole blog post coming where we’re going to talk about data, but about ⅓ comes from our community and partners, ⅓ comes from automated systems, and ⅓ comes from our own incredible research team. When you add it all up it comes to over 8M edits in the last year alone. That comes at an incredible expense – but one that you benefit from directly every day you use either our free or paid products.

It’s also worth noting that we continue to invest heavily in Crunchbase itself. We have over 10k companies and developers using our free APIs, we just released a great mobile iOS app which is free for everyone, and much of our roadmap is about making the Crunchbase experience awesome. In other words, the Crunchbase you know and have used will not only remain free and open, but we’ll be making it better over time. We certainly will have supplemental paid products but we’re going to go out of our way to keep your experience with the product awesome no matter what your use case.

Roadmap: As we look to the future, Crunchbase Pro is only the first step in a long journey. On the data side we’re going to offer your deeper data about more and more companies on our quest to become the internet’s master company record. We’re already forming partnership with great companies including SimilarWeb, Glassdoor, Apptopia, Enigma, and Product Hunt. We have plans to give you even more powerful customization tools and analysis tools on top of all of our data. Our goal is to be your single destination to discover and connect to the companies, people, and investors that matter to you.

I’d be remiss to not end this epic blog post with a few thank yous. Thank you to the entire Crunchbase team. Everyone has been working nonstop to bring you all of the changes and it’s been incredible to be a part of it. I’d also like to thank you – not just for making it to the end of this blog post but also for using Crunchbase and being a part of our amazing community. We know we owe a lot to you for putting your faith in Crunchbase over the years – and we appreciate it.

Want to see what Crunchbase Pro is all about?

Click here to view some cool examples we’ve made.
Click here to learn more about Crunchbase Pro.

  • Originally published September 12, 2016