Crunchbase is known for helping other people track funding rounds and business data, but on Wednesday the San Francisco company announced its own Series D round.
It raised $50 million in a round that was led by Alignment Growth and also included OMERS Ventures, Mayfield and Emergence Capital. The new funding brings its total funding to more than $100 million.
Crunchbase declined to disclose its valuation but it was previously valued at $150 million in 2019, according to PitchBook.
The company was created by Michael Arrington as a project of TechCrunch, another company he founded, in 2007 and was spun off as an independent company eight years later. CEO Jager McConnell has lead the company since 2015.
"We're trying to connect people and opportunities, that's fundamentally what we're trying to do," McConnell told me.
Crunchbase has 75 million users, most of whom use the site for free while 60,000 are paying customers that want its more detailed intelligence whether it's for things like generating sales leads or digging around for strategic acquisitions.
About half of the site's traffic comes from the U.S. and the rest is split between Europe and Asia. And the company would like to increase its coverage of companies in Africa even though it currently gets very little web traffic from the continent, McConnell said.
The company has a data team comprising around 250 employees and contractors, combined, who gather data and McConnell wants to continue hiring for roles including engineering, product, marketing and sales but rather than targeting a specific benchmark for hiring this year, he's eyeing efficient growth.
It has around 20 job openings currently open, according to its website.
Crunchbase was cash flow positive in the first quarter of 2022 and is on track to double its annually recurring revenue from software sales to $46 million by the end of the year, the company said.
And the company says it has reduced its burn rate over the past few years from $3 per $1 of revenue in 2019 to $2 per $9 of revenue in the first half of 2022.
"We definitely want to be able to get to profitability with the money that we've raised. If we continue on our current trajectory, when would that be? We're still figuring that out," McConnell said.
And while the company might seem ripe for an IPO or acquisition, McConnell considers it a 7-year-old company, not 17. He starts counting from when it separated from TechCrunch. An eventual IPO is the goal, though, at some point when the timing makes sense.
With the stock market in a downturn and a potential recession looming, public debuts are off the table for most companies this year.
The new funding will also allow Crunchbase to continue to build out its data team, improve its machine learning capabilities, boost its recommendation engine and build more integrations for software like Salesforce, Outreach, Hubspot and Gmail.
It offers three subscription types: two for individuals or small teams that start at $29 monthly but are billed annually, and a custom option for enterprise teams, according to its website.
Its main competitor is a Vancouver, Wash., based business intelligence service called ZoomInfo, and while both companies cater to businesses with sales teams, Crunchbase says it offers a much more efficient experience for customers.
ZoomInfo provides "an untargeted, not intelligent approach to prospecting. There's no filter for, 'show me the companies that are growing,' 'show me the companies I might want to sell to,'" McConnell said, noting that Crunchbase provides more personalized recommendations.
ZoomInfo does track similar data like funding and revenue, though.
"ZoomInfo does have customizable filters offering numerous ways to help customers define the list of companies they might want to sell to, including companies that are growing. Our highly rated platform is one of the most robust products available for helping customers find a list of companies to target via artificial intelligence-based solutions," a ZoomInfo representative told me in a statement.
Morningstar-owned PitchBook is another business intelligence tool that's known for its extensive dataset on startups, but McConnell doesn't consider it to be a direct competitor because it caters more to investors than sales teams.
