AI finds the leads. People verify them. A Berkeley data company that builds contact intelligence to spec - not off a shelf.
LeadGenius, Berkeley, California - the crowdsourcing experiment that grew into an enterprise buyer-intelligence platform, photographed here by its wordmark.
Most B2B data vendors sell the same thing: access to one giant, static database that everybody else can buy too. LeadGenius sells the opposite - a dataset built for you, sourced on demand, and checked by a person before it lands in your CRM.
Headquartered in Berkeley, California, LeadGenius pairs machine-learning crawlers that comb websites, business directories, government filings and public records with a globally distributed team of human researchers. The software finds candidate contacts and accounts at scale; the researchers verify them, fill gaps, and tailor each record to a client's specification. The company's own framing is blunt about the value: every contact passes through a researcher before delivery.
That hybrid model - what the industry calls "human-in-the-loop" - is the throughline of the whole business. Automation buys reach across markets that off-the-shelf tools tend to skip: EMEA, LATAM, APAC, and the hard-to-reach roles that don't show up in the usual databases. Human verification buys accuracy. LeadGenius bets that revenue teams would rather have fewer, right contacts than more, wrong ones.
The company began in 2011 as MobileWorks, a crowdsourced-labor startup in Y Combinator's Summer class, founded by Anand Kulkarni, Prayag Narula and David Rolnitzky. The original product organized distributed workers to complete online tasks. The founders realized the real asset was the workforce itself - and pointed it at B2B sales research, rebranding as LeadGenius.
Today it counts a reported 150-plus customers, including some of the most recognizable names in tech, and it has folded data privacy - GDPR, CCPA, LGPD - into the foundation of how it sources and stores information rather than bolting it on afterward.
Figures compiled from public company materials, Wikipedia and Crunchbase. Revenue is an approximation.
LeadGenius delivers real-time, compliant B2B contact data and buyer intelligence worldwide - helping sales and marketing teams find decision-makers, activate leads and scale pipeline with precision.
Its customers are enterprise and mid-market revenue teams. Publicly referenced names include Google, Snowflake, Amazon, eBay, Intercom, DoorDash, Salesforce, Autodesk, Microsoft, Sprout Social and Signifyd. In a Snowflake case study, LeadGenius describes enriching and validating global contact and account data with its "tech plus human intelligence" model; an Autodesk engagement cites 4,521 records delivered, with 35% of contacts flagged as having departed their listed roles - a reminder of how fast static data decays.
Stale databases, missing decision-makers, and non-compliant data are the recurring pains for go-to-market teams. LeadGenius addresses them by sourcing fresh, on-demand, and by mapping full buying committees rather than a single point of contact. Because data is sourced uniquely per client and never resold, it also sidesteps the "everyone-has-the-same-list" problem that dulls outreach.
Bespoke datasets built to spec with proprietary automation, then verified by human researchers before delivery.
Tracks role changes, promotions and buying signals so you know the moment a contact moves or a window opens.
Delivers content to opted-in, in-market buyers - turning sourced contacts into engaged leads.
Maps full decision-maker visibility across an account, not just one name.
Enriches records with skills, experience and technographic detail for sharper targeting.
Reveals buyer personalities and communication styles, and monitors engagement signals across social platforms.
Data privacy is more than just regulatory compliance; it's about building and maintaining trust - ensuring businesses can operate efficiently and responsibly in an increasingly interconnected world.
- Mark Godley, former CEO, LeadGeniusThe B2B data market is a race to the biggest number - ZoomInfo touts hundreds of millions of contacts and companies. LeadGenius runs a different race: not how many, but how right. Against ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Cognism, Clearbit (now Breeze Intelligence), UpLead and RocketReach, its edge is custom, human-verified, compliance-first data for hard-to-reach segments - rather than self-serve access to a shared database.
The three pillars it leans on: real-time on-demand sourcing instead of a static list; an AI-plus-human workflow instead of pure automation; and global coverage of niche markets other tools miss.
LeadGenius is B2B SaaS and data-as-a-service. Enterprises pay for custom contact and account datasets built to their spec, plus subscriptions for monitoring, enrichment and activation. Crucially, it sources data uniquely per client and never resells it, adapting its compliance model to each customer's legal framework.
LeadGenius's expertise lives at the intersection of machine learning and organized human labor - and its culture reflects the labor side as much as the tech.
The company was the first crowdsourcing firm to set a minimum wage tied to the local cost of living for workers in the countries where they operate. Its distributed research workforce spans North America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South America, India, Serbia and the Philippines. By the company's own account, roughly 90% of its contractors were underemployed or unemployed before joining, and three of four use their income to support their families.
That social-impact DNA traces straight back to MobileWorks, which was studied as a socially-responsible approach to crowdsourcing before the pivot. The technical expertise - crawling public sources, training machine-learning systems on B2B signals, and running verification at scale - is what turns that workforce into enterprise-grade output. In February 2024, Brendan McGurk stepped in as CEO, with co-founder Mark Godley moving to the board, as the company sharpened its focus on privacy-first data.
Anand Kulkarni, Prayag Narula and David Rolnitzky start a crowdsourced-labor startup in Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch.
The distributed workforce is pointed at B2B sales-lead research; the company rebrands as LeadGenius.
Backers include Sierra Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Alexis Ohanian, Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure and Sam Altman.
Sierra Ventures and Lumia Capital back a round to scale the AI-plus-human data platform.
The company broadens into enrichment, monitoring and buyer-intelligence tooling.
Brendan McGurk becomes CEO as Mark Godley moves to the board; privacy-first data moves front and center.
Co-founder Prayag Narula later founded Marvin (HeyMarvin). Around 90% of LeadGenius's research contractors were unemployed or underemployed before joining.