Crunchbase
Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell
- On Thursday, Silicon Valley startup Crunchbase announced it raised $30 million in Series C funding, led by OMERS Ventures.
- The startup acquires data about private companies, which it then assembles into easy-to-understand corporate profiles, not unlike what Bloomberg does with public companies.
- The lack of publicly available information about private companies is a massive opportunity, Crunchbase CEO Jager McConnell told Business Insider. Soon, he said, job boards and corporate websites will be a thing of the past.
- See the pitch deck that McConnell used to bring in $30 million from OMERS, Emergence, Mayfield, Cowboy Ventures, and Verizon just 3 years after spinning out of Verizon/AOL.
Corporate websites and job pages might soon be a relic of the past, not unlike the personal resume websites that predated LinkedIn.
That's the vision CEO Jager McConnell is selling with Crunchbase, a database of corporate information like jobs and revenue run rates for private companies. These figures are easily searchable for public companies on databases like Bloomberg or Reuters, but are heavily guarded by privately funded startups of all stripes.
"We are the backbone of private company information on the internet," McConnell told Business Insider.
The going price for the next Bloomberg? At least $30 million in Series C funding tied to an undisclosed valuation, which the startup announced Thursday. OMERS Ventures led the round, with participation from Emergence, Mayfield, Cowboy Ventures, and Verizon. The startup has raised more than $57 million since spinning out of Verizon/AOL in 2015.
Crunchbase is not the only company that aggregates data about private companies. It's premium priced competitor, Pitchbook, is another.
But part of Crunchbase's appeal, McConnell said, is its freemium model used by "most" of its 55 million users. It's a one-stop shop for job postings, corporate information, and diversity statistics that are typically touted on a corporate blog. Those sites are too reactive, he said, because they wait for potential candidates or investors to land on them, not unlike his personal resume website he ditched for LinkedIn years later.
"Companies are going to put themselves on Crunchbase because everything is already there, and all these users are already looking for them on Crunchbase," McConnell said. "I don't need to focus on SEO to help people find my website anymore."
But He admits that the corporate site won't ever completely go away, but will be more akin to a company's Instagram profile in that it almost exclusively persists for marketing and branding purposes.
Here's the pitch deck McConnell used to convince investors that Crunchbase could usurp corporate websites, and make SEO a thing of the past.