Since launching the CrunchBase Venture Program at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last week, we’ve added more than 100 venture firms, angel groups, and incubators to the program including Google Ventures. Together our partners have taken part in over 3,900 funding rounds, funded 2,700 companies, and helped guide investment of over $35B. Beyond the numbers, each firm we’ve spoken to has given us incredible feedback about the platform and offered their support in building out an open, timely, and accurate dataset.
Announcing the CrunchBase Venture Program
Editors note: This is a repost of an article we did for TechCrunch article.
We knew CrunchBase was big. We knew because there are 2 million people using the startup database each month. We knew because more than 120k people have contributed 1.6MM data points on companies, entrepreneurs, fundings, exits and more. What we didn’t know, however, was what the investment community thinks about CrunchBase. To answer that question, we spent many weeks visiting venture and angel firms and talking about data and CrunchBase. We learned that most are investing a lot in data and analytics in order to find good companies, ideas, and people. Everyone agreed that CrunchBase is an important source of that information, but we also heard something else: CrunchBase needs to evolve fast to keep pace with these new demands. In particular, Crunchbase needs to be more timely, accurate, and detailed.
NYC Angels Grab Market Share
Editor’s note: This is a repost of an article we did for TechCrunch.
Looking forward to this week’s Disrupt NY 2013, we used the CrunchBase dataset to surface regional trends in US angel funding. Not surprisingly, we found relatively few metros with a substantial number of angel funded companies and the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a formidable presence. But take a look at NYC (in red) – they’ve gone from 12% of the angel deals in 2008 to 20% in 2013. In fact, NYC appears to the only region with growing market share.
CrunchBase Meets Excel, Discover Your Own Insights
CrunchBase is committed to providing the startup community an open, up-to-date, and accurate database of companies, venture fundings, and entrepreneurs. In the spirit of this commitment, we’ve decided to publish the raw data behind articles like NYC Angels Grab Market Share and Mining the Series A Crunch. Of course the data has always been available through the CrunchBase API, but not everyone is up for REST APIs. So today we’re going to try something different – an Excel Spreadsheet which contains a significant portion of our dataset.
By releasing CrunchBase data in a simple, easy to consume format, we hope that the community will produce and share valuable insights on technology startups. In fact, if you share those insights with us we’ll do our best to publish them for everyone to see. Please let us know what you discover.
Mining the Series A Crunch
Editor’s note: This is a repost of an article we did for TechCrunch.
Back in November, rumblings of a Series A Crunch took hold and speculation began about the number of seed funded companies destined to close. Fast forward a few months and we are now seeing lists of companies that may be imminent victims of the crunch. While these are purely speculative, the information can prove valuable for corporate development teams, recruiters, and those in search of interesting IP. One list announced last week has gone on sale for nearly $5,000!
Onavo Ranks the VCs of Mobile
Our friends at Onavo recently combined data from their mobile insights platform with the CrunchBase API to rank the VCs of mobile. Using application market share as a proxy for success, Onavo identified Union Square Ventures as the most successful Series A investor with Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Felicis Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners rounding out the top five. Visit the Onavo Insights Blog to read the full analysis.
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6 Degrees of Crunchbase with Wikisway
Editor’s note: Guest author Huston Hedinger is the Founder and CEO of Wikisway, a Portland Seed Fund alumni company. He founded Wikisway while finishing his Master’s in Policy, Economics, and Social Network Analysis at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Before Wikisway, Huston worked for Village Capital with startups in the Middle East. You can connect with him directly at Huston.Hedinger@wikisway.com or @hustonhedinger.
For entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists CrunchBase is the go-to resource for startup related research. We believe the most important aspect of CrunchBase is the relationships between people and organizations. We wanted to make it easier for the startup community to understand these relationships so we built the Wikisway Beta Platform, a powerful visualization of CrunchBase’s already rich content.
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Research with CrunchBase Accelerating
Editor’s note: Guest blogger Colleen Chien is an Assistant Professor of Law at Santa Clara University of Law. She does empirical research on the patent system and has testified before Congress and various governmental agencies on the impact of innovation policy on startups. Her recent study on Startups and Patent Trolls was crunched here and here. You can follow her @colleen_chien or contact her at colleenchien@gmail.com. This is the first post in our Research Spotlight Program.
There’s actually an answer to most questions, but often the data or resources to get to the bottom of it are lacking. Historically it’s been difficult to get good data about startups because young companies have a smaller footprint – in terms of revenues, customers, and other measures tracked by traditional business intelligence firms. Crunchbase, however, has filled this gap to become an invaluable resource for those focused on figuring out what is really going on among startups. This may explain why, as Crunchbase has grown, so has its popularity with researchers as seen on Google Scholar.
Introducing the Research Spotlight Program
Today we are introducing the CrunchBase Research Spotlight Program, the companion to the Developer Spotlight Program. This is our way of featuring great research that’s been done using CrunchBase data.
Researchers, academics, and whomever else has a love for CrunchBase data can take part in the Spotlight Program. If we choose your research, we’ll write about your work on the CrunchBase blog and share it through our regular newsletters. Of course we’ll also let our friends at TechCrunch know about your work. Continue reading
Crunching CrunchBase
Editor’s note: Guest author Bruno Aziza is Vice President of Marketing at SiSense and the author of two books on data and analytics. Prior to SiSense, Bruno worked at BusinessObjects/SAP, Apple, Microsoft and other data start-ups. You can connect with him directly at bruno.aziza@sisense.com. This is the first post in our Developer Spotlight Program.
Everyone in the Tech Industry knows CrunchBase, the crowd-sourced database of companies and people. So when our team of data geeks found out that CrunchBase had opened its API to the world, we thought it was a great opportunity to use our Big Data Analytics software to crunch CrunchBase data. We imported all of CrunchBase data into SiSense Prism, combined the 50+ tables and the 100′s of thousands of rows the API let us read and built a set of snappy dashboards we thought entrepreneurs, investors and technology observers would enjoy. The results – which we dubbed “CrunchAnalytics” – is a solution that’s available for free @ www.crunchbase.sisense.com.
