Crunchbase Secures $50Million to Help Customers Build Pipeline and Grow Revenue With Its Account-Based Prospecting Platform

Accelerating product-led growth, capital efficiency, and brand strength put the company on a path to profitability

Crunchbase, a prospecting platform powered by best-in-class proprietary data, announced it has secured $50 million in connection with its Series D funding. Alignment Growth led the oversubscribed round, with participation by existing Crunchbase investors including OMERS Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Emergence. Alex Iosilevich, Partner at Alignment Growth, will also join the Crunchbase board of directors.

Latest Aithority Insights: AiThority.com to Attend The Character of AI – A Technology Ethics Conference (Virtual)

Crunchbase’s account-based prospecting software enables prospectors—in sales, recruiting, business development, and finance—to find and engage with qualified accounts, while simultaneously creating awareness for companies that want to be discovered. Crunchbase attracts more than 75 million unique visitors annually and recently surpassed 60,000 paying customers with over half of the Fortune 500 and thousands of SMBs represented.

“It’s more important than ever for businesses to tap into account-based intelligence for their prospecting, whether they’re selling, investing, or fundraising. With fast-changing market conditions, prospectors can’t rely on spamming contact lists to hit quota. They need a targeted approach that starts with finding qualified accounts and ends with compelling outreach to the right decision-makers—that’s exactly what our customers do on Crunchbase,” said Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase.

The company accelerated its highly capital efficient product-led growth last year with the launch of a suite of all-new SaaS products. These drove a 5x year-over-year increase in new recurring revenue in Q1 2022, and total software ARR is on track to double by end of year. With this upward growth trend, efficient cash management and Series D funding, the company is on a path to profitability.

AI and ML News: AI: Continuing the Chase for Brain-Level Efficiency

Crunchbase’s platform has evolved significantly since its last funding round. The company’s software now offers features to guide prospectors throughout their workflow. Customers are reporting improvements in account identification, pipeline generation, email open rates and meeting booking volume. New product capabilities that power these results include:

• Account discovery: Find companies that meet your ideal customer profile with territory filters, AI-powered recommendations, similar company suggestions, CRM data in search, and 6 billion new data edits in the last year.
• Account qualification: Focus on growing companies that have buying power using new growth and contraction signals, layoffs and hiring filters, Chrome extension, and Salesforce integration.
• Account tracking: Stay up-to-date on changes at priority accounts with email alerts, saved searches and lists, as well as searchable user-generated notes and tags.
• Prospect engagement: Connect with the right leads at the right time directly on Crunchbase with newly added contact data, contact search, Outreach integration, Gmail integration, and auto-generated email templates.

“The Crunchbase SaaS platform combines rich and proprietary company data with direct access to decision-makers within a single intuitive interface—at compelling price points—making it a powerful tool for driving ROI across a variety of use cases, from sales to recruiting and more. We expect that Crunchbase will continue to gain accelerated industry adoption and are excited to support the company’s growth momentum alongside strong participation from the existing investor group,” said Alex Iosilevich, Partner at Alignment Growth.

Crunchbase plans to use funds from the Series D to accelerate product innovation and deepen relationships with dealmakers in sales, marketing, finance, recruiting, and executive leadership roles. Upcoming product improvements will include third-party integrations that embed Crunchbase more deeply in existing prospecting workflows, enhancements to actionable machine-learning powered recommendations, new data that delivers insights only available on Crunchbase, and reporting tools to quantify customers’ ROI. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC acted as exclusive financial adviser to Crunchbase in connection with the transaction.

AI ML in Marketing: AI and Big Data Analysis Used to Find Brands’ Emotional Connection

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]