The CrunchBase Venture Program is backed by more than 400 venture firms, incubators, and angel groups that are helping us build the definitive open dataset for the startup community. In 2013, members of the venture program have already participated in 1,610 funding rounds worth over $12 billion – more than one-third of all funding activity in CrunchBase. Today we’re rolling out a new way for members of the venture program to maintain their CrunchBase profiles, an endeavor that grows more important every day as more teams come to rely on the CrunchBase dataset and more applications are built against our API.
Each venture program member can now receive a detailed Excel spreadsheet containing their CrunchBase profile. Just edit the spreadsheet, send it back to our team, and we’ll update your CrunchBase profile accordingly. SV Angel has allowed us to share their export, which is available for download here. “CrunchBase has been an indispensable reference tool for our team at Felicis. With its new features, it’s more up to date and easier to use,” says Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures.
Maintaining complete and accurate CrunchBase profiles is more important than ever. Top investors of all sizes are integrating CrunchBase data into their in-house analyses of market activity and opportunities — the larger Quantitative VC trend that TechCrunch has been covering over the last year.
And a new class of startup, such as Mattermark, Dashboard.io, Inkwire, DataFox,and Cdling are using CrunchBase in conjunction with other data sets to provide startup rankings and other insights about the next big thing. Large shifts are also remaking investing. For example, we can only expect the flood of data to increase due to recent SEC rule changes around open solicitation that require even more disclosures from companies using funding platforms like AngelList.
Data on CrunchBase is public, and members of the venture program are welcome to share their CrunchBase spreadsheets as they see fit. This includes sharing with private databases like VentureSource, PitchBook, PrivCo and CB Insights, which are often seen as competing with CrunchBase. By enabling firms to update just one startup database, we hope to make everyone’s life easier. “It’s helpful to have a place to manage and share our data in one easy step. Importantly,” says DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein, “CrunchBase helps us maintain accurate and verified public information about our investments.”
We’re working hard to make CrunchBase the definitive dataset for the startup community. It’s not perfect, but it is getting better every day. “CrunchBase has become a key resource for us: we use it several times a day to research companies, investors and markets,” says Jeff Clavier, Founder & Managing Partner of SoftTech VC. “Now that it is properly resourced, we have seen a clear improvement in quality and freshness – for startups, it is better than established, paid for databases.”
If you are an investment firm that is not already part of the Members of the CrunchBase Venture Program, please consider joining.