Crunchbase

That record changed hands more than once. AOL acquired TechCrunch in 2010, and Crunchbase came along for the ride, spending years inside a large media organization. In 2015 it spun out as an independent company, raising roughly $8.5 million led by Emergence Capital and setting off on its own path. What followed was a steady climb: an $18 million Series B from Mayfield in 2017, a $30 million Series C led by OMERS Ventures in 2019, and a $50 million Series D in 2022 - more than $151 million in total.

Today Crunchbase employs roughly 260 people, is headquartered at 564 Market Street in San Francisco, and is led by CEO Jager McConnell, a Salesforce alumnus who spent years running product for Sales Cloud. Under McConnell the company made a deliberate turn. It stopped describing itself purely as a place to look up who raised money and started describing itself as a company that predicts what will happen next - which funding rounds are coming, which companies will be acquired, which will go public, and which will quietly wind down.

That shift is not cosmetic. As of late 2025 Crunchbase reported generating more than 250 million predictions, with funding forecasts covering over a million companies and exit forecasts covering more than 1.5 million. More telling than the raw count: the company says over 5,000 of those predictions have already been confirmed by real-world events. The private markets are famously opaque, and Crunchbase's whole thesis is that opacity is a data problem, not a permanent condition.

The business underneath is less glamorous than the mission and, arguably, more durable. Crunchbase makes money from subscriptions and from selling access to its data - the kind of steady, unshowy software revenue that a 2021 Forbes profile noted was "quietly making millions." A company whose entire product is watching other companies grow has itself grown into a real software business.

The private-market data category is crowded. PitchBook, owned by Morningstar, is the deep, expensive reference tool for institutional investors. CB Insights leans on research and analyst narrative. Tracxn, Dealroom and Owler each carve out their own slices, while ZoomInfo and Apollo.io approach the same companies from a sales-contact angle. LinkedIn and Wellfound cover the people and the jobs.

Crunchbase's distinguishing bets are accessibility and forward-looking data. Where some rivals sell five-figure enterprise contracts, Crunchbase Pro costs less than a team lunch, putting four million companies within reach of a solo founder or a single BDR. And where much of the category documents what already happened, Crunchbase has invested heavily in predicting what happens next - a direction that suits a data set large and clean enough to train models on.

That accessibility traces back to its origins. Much of the early database was community-contributed, an open, wiki-like effort to record the startup world. That participation compounded into an asset the company now monetizes across subscriptions and licensing.

The business model is straightforward SaaS plus data licensing: tiered individual and team subscriptions, enterprise API and bulk data deals, CRM integrations, and profile management. The moat is not a single feature - it is more than fifteen years of structured, maintained data. That is the thing a competitor cannot simply copy overnight, and the raw material that makes the prediction models plausible.