b2b-data
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The Intelligence Behind the Intelligent Agent
Explorium spent its first act helping predictive models see beyond a company’s own database. Now it supplies the outside facts that sales agents need before they can decide whom to contact - and why.
The $1,000 Question That Built Slintel
Before Slintel could predict which company might buy, its founders asked a simpler question: would anyone pay for the answer? The service that followed became a data business and, in 2021, part of 6sense.
Luminate counts the hits. The hard part is deciding what counts.
The company behind Billboard’s charts has turned music measurement into a business spanning Hollywood, brand deals and Fortnite. Its real product is a number the industry can agree to use.
InFynd Wants to Fix the List Before You Make the Pitch
The British data company is stretching beyond contact lists into healthcare intelligence, managed outreach and AI agents. Its most persuasive pitch starts with a less glamorous job: cleaning up the CRM.
Cognism Puts Europe on Speed Dial
Cognism sells something every outbound team wants and nobody can fully guarantee: a clean route to the right buyer. Its sharpest argument is not database size, but Europe-ready phone data with compliance checks baked into the workflow.
Apollo Puts the Whole Sales Floor in One Tab
Apollo folds prospecting, enrichment, outreach, calls, and deal work into one busy cockpit. The bargain is real, provided you test the data before you trust the autopilot.
Reply.io Wants the Whole Outbound Desk
Reply.io now finds prospects, warms inboxes, writes the pitch, works the follow-up, and can even book the meeting. The clever bit is not the robot rep. It is putting the entire outbound mess on one desk.
ZoomInfo Knows Who’s Buying. Read the Fine Print.
The B2B data heavyweight has become an AI-powered operating layer for revenue teams. Its database can save hours; its quote, credits and renewal terms deserve a spreadsheet of their own.
Lusha Knows Who to Call. The Hard Part Is Knowing When.
The little browser extension that found a phone number has grown into a data layer for revenue teams and AI agents. It is quick, clever, and useful - provided you test its coverage before buying a mountain of credits.
They Burned $550,000 Selling Trust. Then The Lifetime Value Co. Learned to Sell Curiosity
Josh Levy and Ross Cohen spent 11 months pitching an identity badge nobody would buy. Their pivot - from asking people to verify themselves to helping customers investigate the world around them - became a portfolio of data products used by millions.
Clay Versus Lusha Is the Wrong Question
Clay can call Lusha for contact data, then route, score and act on the result. The useful choice is not which brand wins, but which layer your team actually needs.
Cognism Is ZoomInfo Built for Europe’s Privacy Rules
In plain English, Cognism is ZoomInfo rebuilt around Europe’s privacy rules. Its edge is not that ZoomInfo ignores GDPR, but that Cognism makes local compliance, phone verification and European coverage the product.
Apollo Looks Cheaper Until You Price the Missing Data
Apollo sells prospect data and sales engagement in one system. Groove runs the workflow, but its quote only makes sense after you add the data, integrations and operating costs your team still needs.
The Real Reason Cognism Beats ZoomInfo in Europe
The four sales-data tools solve different problems. For teams prospecting across Europe, Cognism’s deeper compliance workflow - not a longer feature list - is the buying argument that matters.
DemandScience
The Boston company turns 247 million professional profiles and a web of intent signals into something B2B marketers pay for by the qualified lead - and largely pay only when the lead fits the spec.
Abhilash Chowdhary
Abhilash Chowdhary is the co-founder and CEO of Crustdata (YC F24), a San Francisco company building real-time B2B data and a search layer for AI agents. A computer science graduate of IIIT Hyderabad, he spent over a decade as a robotics and data engineer at Yahoo, Adobe, Postmates X, and Serve Robotics before turning a bootstrapped side project into a company that raised a $6M seed round led by Y Combinator and A Capital.
Leadspace
Leadspace is a B2B data intelligence company that unifies buyers, accounts, and buying signals into a single continuously updated data layer for go-to-market teams. Its GTM Data Intelligence Cloud enriches, scores, and activates data across CRM and marketing systems like Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot, helping sales and marketing teams find, segment, and prioritize their ideal customers. Founded in 2007 and backed by Jerusalem Venture Partners, the company has raised roughly $111M and counts enterprises such as Salesforce, Zoom, and American Express among its customers.
Eric Presbrey
Eric Presbrey is the CEO of Leadspace, the B2B customer data platform and revenue automation company whose AI-driven data intelligence powers go-to-market teams at enterprises such as Microsoft, Salesforce and Nvidia. Appointed in April 2025, he brings more than two decades of commercial leadership across marketing technology and data companies, having served as chief revenue officer at PebblePost and Centrical, president of publicly traded Zeta Global, and a member of the Epsilon leadership team that drove 10x growth. Based in Dallas, Texas, he is known for building high-performing go-to-market teams and scaling data-driven revenue engines.
Demandbase
Demandbase is a San Francisco-based B2B go-to-market software company that pioneered account-based marketing (ABM) and now runs Demandbase One, a unified platform combining account intelligence, intent data, advertising, sales intelligence and AI agents. It helps revenue teams identify in-market accounts, coordinate marketing and sales across channels, and turn buyer signals into pipeline. Founded in 2006 by Chris Golec and led by CEO Gabe Rogol, the company serves hundreds of enterprise B2B customers.
LeadGenius
LeadGenius is a Berkeley-based B2B contact-data and buyer-intelligence company that blends machine learning with a globally distributed team of human researchers to build custom, compliance-first datasets for revenue teams. Rather than reselling a static database, it sources contact and account data on demand for each client, verifying every record before delivery, and layers in signals like role changes, technographics and buying-committee mapping. Spun out of the crowdsourcing startup MobileWorks in Y Combinator's 2011 class, the company pairs its data business with a social mission: it was the first crowdsourcing firm to tie worker pay to local living wages.
Sumble
Sumble is a San Francisco AI startup building a knowledge graph of the world's external company data. Founded by Kaggle creators Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, it crawls job boards, company sites, social media, and regulatory filings, then uses large language models to surface technographics, org charts, and active projects for go-to-market teams. It emerged from stealth in October 2025 with $38.5M in funding and covers roughly 2.6 million companies worldwide.
FTN (For The Numbers)
FTN - short for For The Numbers - is a Las Vegas-based sports data and media company that turns advanced NFL, MLB and NBA numbers into fantasy and betting tools. Launched in 2020 (when the only live sport was Korean baseball), it now runs a network of subscription sites for season-long fantasy, daily fantasy, and sports betting, publishes articles, podcasts and livestreams, and is the new home of Aaron Schatz's DVOA metric after Football Outsiders closed. It serves both consumers who want an edge in their leagues and B2B clients who license its proprietary data.
Surfe
Surfe is a connected revenue workspace that bridges LinkedIn and CRMs so sales teams can find, enrich, and sync prospect data without leaving their browser. Its browser extension and waterfall enrichment engine chain 15+ data providers to deliver verified emails and mobile numbers, and its buying-signal layer flags which prospects are ready to talk today. Founded in Paris in 2020 as Leadjet by David Maurice Chevalier and Romain Ginestou, the company rebranded to Surfe in 2022 alongside a EUR4M seed round, and now serves teams at companies like Google, Uber, Amazon Web Services, Spendesk, and Pigment.
Shovels
Shovels is an AI-powered building-permit intelligence platform that turns fragmented local-government data into a queryable source of truth on construction activity, covering more than 130 million permits across 1,800+ US jurisdictions.
Ben Eisenberg
Ben Eisenberg is the CEO of People Data Labs, the B2B data company that supplies the clean, structured person and company datasets behind AI models, recruiting platforms, and sales tools. He joined as a product hire, climbed through senior roles across the business over seven years, and in September 2024 took over from the founders with a mandate to push the company toward $100M ARR. A UC Berkeley computer science and history double major, he is known for a pure data-company philosophy, a compliance-first stance, and a self-deprecating sense of humor (his LinkedIn handle is, proudly, li-influencer).
People Data Labs
People Data Labs is a data-as-a-service company that sells clean, structured B2B data through developer-friendly APIs. Instead of selling dashboards or seats, it sells the raw material - billions of professional and company records that engineers, data scientists, and product teams use to build their own tools for recruiting, sales, marketing, identity verification, and AI. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company positions itself as the data layer underneath other companies' products rather than a competitor to them.