Today marks an exciting milestone for Crunchbase! We just closed an oversubscribed $50 million Series D and put ourselves on a path to profitability. Alignment Growth led the round and was joined by our existing investors, Mayfield Fund, OMERS Ventures, and Emergence. This is a major accomplishment for our team and I couldn’t be prouder.
Investors we spoke with echoed the trends we’re seeing in Crunchbase data: We are in the middle of one of the most challenging times for startups to raise. So, the fact that we had more firms trying to invest in us than we were even looking for is a huge vote of confidence in our company, brand, and the products we’ve built.
Now that we’ve closed the Series D, I wanted to take a step back and share a behind-the-scenes look at what attracted investors to Crunchbase and give a preview of what’s to come.
It has been thrilling to see Crunchbase’s vision come to life over the last 5 years. Jager and the team have successfully built a unique account-based prospecting platform on top of the best-in-class data they’re known for. We are super excited for the future of the company and the millions of users who rely on Crunchbase daily.
— Rajeev Batra, Partner, Mayfield Fund
The Crunchbase prospecting platform
While people used to recognize Crunchbase for its funding data, today that data point is just one small ingredient in the sophisticated software platform we’ve built. In fact, we now have a lineup of SaaS offerings that help B2B prospectors—in sales, recruiting, finance, business development, and more—discover new accounts, qualify accounts, track accounts, and ultimately engage with leads, all in one platform.
One of the things that differentiates our software is it guides prospectors to use an account-based approach to dealmaking. It’s a much more effective way to connect with leads than simply exporting and mass emailing unfiltered contact lists. And, as difficult economic conditions impact more companies, knowing whether a target account is on the upswing or not gives prospectors the power to focus outreach on decision-makers at companies actually in a position to make a deal.
If you haven’t had a chance to try out the new features we’ve launched, here is a quick summary of how prospectors can use Crunchbase throughout their workflow:
1. Discovery
Find companies that meet your ideal customer profile with territory filters that let you winnow down search results, machine learning-powered recommendations that show new accounts to consider, similar company suggestions that highlight new brands you may not know, CRM data in search to make it easier to see what accounts are new to you, and 6 billion new data edits in the last year to ensure that you’re getting fresh and up-to-date information.
2. Qualification
Focus on growing companies that have buying power by using new growth and contraction signals as well as layoff and hiring filters. Get context on accounts as you’re researching them on the web with our Chrome extension. When you’re ready to take action, you can also sync new accounts that meet your criteria directly to Salesforce.
3. Tracking
Stay up to date on changes at priority accounts with email alerts that go straight to your inbox. Save accounts to a list to monitor activity or save an entire search to surface when a new account fits your existing criteria. Add searchable, user-generated notes and tags to keep targets organized and help teammates stay in the loop.
4. Engagement
Connect with the right leads at the right time directly on Crunchbase with newly added decision-maker contact data, contact search, Outreach integration, and Gmail integration. You can even use auto-generated email templates that pull in relevant data about your prospects to ensure your messages are targeted and get results.
The Crunchbase SaaS platform combines rich and proprietary company data with direct access to decision-makers within a single intuitive interface—at compelling price points—making it a powerful tool for driving ROI across a variety of use cases, from sales to recruiting and more. We expect that Crunchbase will continue to gain accelerated industry adoption and are excited to support the company’s growth momentum alongside strong participation from the existing investor group.
— Alex Iosilevich, Partner, Alignment Growth and newest Crunchbase Board Member
Crunchbase business growth
Our brand strength and product-led growth, combined with our product innovation and continued investment in data, also contributed to a major acceleration in our business. We now have over 75 million unique users on the platform annually and recently surpassed 60,000 customers, with over half of the Fortune 500 and thousands of SMBs represented. With increased adoption of our new SaaS lineup, we are also on track to double software ARR by the end of 2022. I’m especially proud of the fact that we have been able to generate this kind of growth while keeping our burn rate in check. In the first half of this year we drove $9 million net new ARR at only $2 million burn—that’s best in class according to Bessemer’s efficiency benchmarks, and puts us on the path to profitability.
It’s also exciting to see that we’re not the only ones benefiting from the updates we’ve implemented in our platform. Our customers let us know that prospecting with Crunchbase is significantly impacting their businesses as well:
- UserTesting’s sales team filled their pipeline with over 2K new accounts that matched their ideal customer profile using our company growth signals feature.
- Dialpad achieved a 50% open rate on prospecting emails leveraging real-time data to perfectly time and tailor outreach.
- Chat Metrics generated a 400% increase in meetings booked by building targeted account lists and leveraging Crunchbase’s contact data to connect with decision-makers.
Prospect smarter with Crunchbase.
It’s time to stop spamming contact lists. Uncover qualified accounts and connect with decision-makers all in one platform.
The Crunchbase team
Our 200+ person team is the driving force behind Crunchbase’s success, and we’ve done a lot to invest in building up the internal culture and values that guide the way we work:
- Transitioned to a remote-first approach, giving employees flexibility to work where they want
- Expanded hiring beyond the Bay Area to 15 new regions across the U.S.
- Created and delivered on company-wide commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion
- Gave all nonexecutive employees a 7% raise to combat inflation, in addition to merit increases
- Hired 70 new employees in the first half of 2022, alone, including our first ever Chief People Officer, Kelly Scheib
- Promoted several long-time employees to the C-suite, including Robert Conrad (Chief Technology Officer), Shanee Ben-Zur (Chief Growth and Marketing Officer), Neal Patel (Chief Revenue Officer), and Marcus Lo (Chief Financial Officer)
- Earned a spot on Inc’s Best Places to Work list, where we scored a whopping 94 out of 100 based on an independent third-party survey of our employees
If you’re interested in helping us continue to deliver on our mission to democratize access to opportunities, you can check out all of our open roles on our careers page.
What’s next for Crunchbase
In addition to expanding our team, we’ll use funds from Crunchbase’s Series D to invest in bringing our solution to more prospectors around the world and add features to our platform that will make it even easier for customers to search less and close more deals. Here are some of the new innovations you can look forward to seeing in Crunchbase:
- Third-party integrations: We want to make it even easier to use Crunchbase as part of your workflow, so we’ll be launching new integrations with the sales prospecting tools you use most, starting with HubSpot.
- Machine learning-powered recommendations: Why should you try to find a needle in a haystack when we can do it for you? We’re working on new actionable, intelligent recommendations that help prospectors focus on the right accounts, contacts, and tasks to hit their goals.
- Sophisticated reporting: They say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So we’re building dashboards to help customers track efficacy of activities on Crunchbase, along with the number of opportunities and ARR available to them.
If you have any ideas or suggestions for how we can improve our product, let us know! You can reach us at hello@crunchbase.com.
Thank you
We wouldn’t be on this path if it weren’t for our employees, customers, investors, and community. To everyone that has helped us build Crunchbase into the successful company it is today, thank you. We can’t wait to write our next chapter together!
