In case it wasn’t already clear to you that later-stage social, mobile and deal-oriented companies led venture fundraising last year, here’s some analysis of CrunchBase data that drives the point home, courtesy of Alexey Tolkachiov at BuzzSparks.org. → Read More
Most investments fail but the few successful ones more than make all the money back — or so startup investors hope. But what sort of returns do these profitable exits bring in? According to a new analysis of all the exits listed in CrunchBase, the average successful company has raised $25.3 million, and sold for $196.8 million, for investor profits of 676% (if you assume the investors own 100% of the company, which they normally don’t).
Meanwhile, IPO-bound companies generated lower percentage returns, but made a lot more money per exit. The average one raised $580.3 million while private, then went public with a market cap of $2.3 billion on its first day of public trading for 303% profit on investment. Mouse over the dots below for more details.
→ Read More
Following my post last night about our effort to use CrunchBase in more ways on TechCrunch, some readers have shared how they’re already using it. One was Dirk Neumann from “social supercomputer” startup Opani, which provides tools to help people more easily analyze large data sets.
He’s used CrunchBase data to try to come up with a formula for pricing talent in startup acquisitions. His analysis, below, is in response to a recent panel at law firm Orrick, where a number of acquisition heads at major tech companies had noted that there was “no general formula” for doing so.
He identified 71 early-stage acquisitions and 84 late-stage acquisitions in CrunchBase, then further defined the early stage group as startups purchased for below $66 million, with fewer than 50 employees, and investments of less than $5 million. Later-stage companies were defined as having acquisition prices above $66 million and between 50 and 500 employees. The findings are a bit rough, but here they are: → Read More
Remember that time the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about an influx of “start-up” companies raising seed/angel rounds and then all those companies subsequently trying to raise Series A rounds and failing hard? And then all these VCs and angels got in a fight about it, on Twitter, and on their own blogs?
Well, we pulled some rough funding data from Crunchbase (which come to think of it should be a National Treasure), and, as it turns out, more and more companies are raising seed and angel rounds (we’re counting both as the same) and less and less companies are raising Series A. In fact the number of seed deals went up 33% from 2008 to 2010, while Series A deals were down 9.6% during the same period. → Read More
A research firm focused on clean energy and green innovation, the Cleantech Group, launched its i3 Platform today— and it’s something like a paid Crunchbase, with a dash of Alltop and Gartner, for green tech ventures.
The product became privately available to some of Cleantech Group’s clients in late May. Now, some of the i3 Platform is available for free public use via Research.cleantech.com. Free users get basic search and brief— as in one sentence— company profiles.
Paid subscribers to i3, however, get access to detailed company profiles, complete search results, market mapping tools, regular Industry Insights and quarterly investment reports from the Cleantech Group. The product is meant to help the firm’s clients see how green tech players are connecting… → Read More
A month ago, Polaris Ventures principal Ryan Spoon wrote up a quick blog post looking for a developer with Chrome extension/app experience. He had a pretty simple idea for something to help him with his job. Matt Basta saw the post and created the extension Spoon was looking for almost instantly. Now they’re opening it up for all to use and calling it Polaris Insights.
The straightforward app is very, very slick. You simply visit the website of a company you’re interested in, hit the extension button, and you get an overlay of the CrunchBase, LinkedIn, and Quora data for the company. The CrunchBase column shows you the funding information, the LinkedIn column shows you your connections within the company, and the Quora column shows you some of the Q&A conversations going on about about company. → Read More
Most popular Internet services have now been “instantized”, inspired by the recent unveiling of Google Instant, which “searches before you type”.
You can now add our very own CrunchBase to the list, courtesy of 16-year old entrepreneur and tinkerer Spencer Schoeben. Using his CrunchBase Instant you can search our rich database of companies, persons, financial organizations and whatnot faster than ever before. → Read More
After a year when venture funding was in the doldrums, it roared back in the fourth quarter of 2009 to nearly $15 billion, according to a tally of the venture rounds in CrunchBase. The total value of disclosed fundings for the quarter was $14.85 billion, up 113 percent from a year ago (when the total was $6.96 billion), and up 78 percent from the third quarter of 2009 ($8.35 billion).
Some of the big funding rounds of the quarter included Zynga’s $180 million, Playdom’s $43 million, and RockYou’s $50 million. But clean tech cleaned up even more, with Horizon Wind Energy bringing in $318 million in financing, Silver Spring Networks adding $105 million to its coffers, and Sun Run Generation raising $90 million. → Read More
Since the official launch of our integration between CrunchBase and Facebook Connect in November, we’ve seen 19% (5,087 out of 26,850) of our edits come from newly registered, non-anonymous users. Even after the predictable spike around the announcement, we’ve seen a sustained and growing percentage of our edits coming from these users (see figure below).
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so we thought it would be fun to give some credit to those users most actively involved in keeping CrunchBase up-to-date and accurate (apart from our internal team of course – it just wouldn’t be a contest). The top ten startup gurus are now highlighted in the right-hand column on the CrunchBase home page, and you can also view the full list to find out where you stack up. We’re planning to completely open up registration (without requiring Facebook Connect) in the near future as well to further broaden the field.
We’re also excited to announce a few new ways for you to keep up to date with the latest CrunchBase data. → Read More
For the past several weeks, we’ve been making improvements to CrunchBase to build a more engaging product for the people that drive it – which is to say, “everybody”. Since it was launched, Crunchbase has always been a freely editable repository of information about technology companies. Since February 2008, we’ve received over 100,000 edits from anonymous users in addition to the copious amounts of information that TechCrunch writers funnel to it on a regular basis.
We’re excited to announce that these contributions no longer have to remain unattributed. Starting today, anyone with a Facebook account can sign up for an account on CrunchBase by using Facebook Connect. Edits will still be moderated (after all, this is the Internet we’re talking about here), but users who prove themselves to be trustworthy will, with time, start to see additional privileges associated with their accounts.
All of these edits represent a treasure trove of information, so we’ve also been working on ways to better present the edits as they occur. Visitors to the CrunchBase homepage will now notice a list of recent milestones – a “stream,” if you will – that represents the most recent changes to the database. We’ve filtered out the more trivial edits in an effort to make this the kind of real-time information that even Paul Carr could love. These funding rounds, acquisitions, investments, IPOs, and other major milestones will now also appear on the individual pages that they relate to. → Read More
Whether it’s a sign of economic recovery or just investment bankers getting ready to take off the month of August, there’s been a lot acquisition activity lately. In the last week alone, IBM purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, Amazon bought Zappos for $928 million, Sprint paid $483 million for Virgin Mobile, AdKnowledge paid $50 million for Super Rewards, and Yahoo picked up Xoopit for $20 million.
So far in July, the value of the acquisitions we track on CrunchBase totals $9.6 billion, which is nearly three times more M&A activity than the $2.6 billion we tracked in June. M&A exits already started to perk up in the second quarter , according to our latest CrunchBase report. But the increased deal flow on July suggests that corporate buyers are opening up their purse strings even more while acquisition prices are still relatively cheap. → Read More
Is the worst behind us? The broad worldwide recession hit the venture capital and startup communities hard last year. Memories of the NASDAQ meltdown and venture capital “nuclear winter” earlier this decade sent everyone into a tizzy as they feared a repeat performance—venture dollars froze and hundreds of thousands of tech workers were laid off.
But it appears that the worst is over for now. Or at least, the broad indicators suggest that venture and entrepreneurial activity has stabilized and may in some cases be trending up. In Q2 2009 we tracked via CrunchBase a total of 400 estimated new startups founded, $6.4 billion in new venture capital financings and $15.8 billion in merger and acquisition activity. (Download the full report here for $195) And we only tracked 20,000 new layoffs, just 10% of the 200,000 we saw let go in Q1 2009.
(Stats and charts after the jump). → Read More
We’re all glad Q1 is behind us.
Silicon Valley and the start-up ecosystem certainly was not immune to the general economic malaise. The TechCrunch sweet spot, early-stage start-ups, was particularly hurt.
The number of start-ups getting started was down 65% vs Q1 2008. We saw just 184 new start-ups formed, down from 546 in 1Q 2008.
Start-Ups Founded: January 2008 – March 2009
Source: CrunchBase
Early-stage start-ups are working hard to do more with less. The average number of staff at new start-ups founded 1Q 2009 was 6, down from 8 a year ago. How do we know? It turns out that there’s a wealth of interesting facts that we can glean from CrunchBase, our structured-wiki startup directory and primary data source for TechCrunch Research. What else did we learn from CrunchBase? → Read More
If you are looking to do some quick competitive analysis, a new site called BizShark offers a wealth of data about companies. Bizshark is a nifty automated information aggregator. It pulls together the latest business profiles, news, financials, web analytics, social footprint, marketing strategies, and other business information by searching across more than 50 Internet business databases. The site is pretty comprehensive and features a particularly useful tool that compares businesses with their competitors by analytics, traffic and news volume. Using its “CompetitorSort algorithm,” BizShark constantly monitors online discussion threads on related companies, products, and services and then uses a filter to rank the competition by link authority.
BizShark aggregates data from Wikipedia, our own CrunchBase, Technorati, Compete, and Google Search. Secondary sources for information include Yahoo, Quantcast, Alexa, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Indeed, BackType, and other sites. BizShark doesn’t allow users to edit or contribute data to its system, forgoing the Wiki model. Its approach is similar to Quarkbase and KillerStartups’ Dataopedia, an information aggregator that lets users see all the data it can find about a website (Dataopedia also uses Crunchbase data). → Read More
One of the best decisions we ever made at TechCrunch was when we launched CrunchBase, our open startup directory, at the end of 2007. We aspired to make it the best current source of information about technology startups, people and investors. Data is added by TechCrunch editors, our amazing team of interns, and the community at large (it is a moderated wiki, so anyone can contribute data). Over the last year, the database has grown to include more than 15,000 companies, 26,000 people and 1,700 investors. In short, it’s finally gotten big enough to become interesting. So as 2008 drew to a close, we started running statistics on the structured data to see what we could learn.
Today, we unveil our first premium research product, the TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review, which presents our key findings. The report takes a step back from the news that breaks day-to-day and provides a unique perspective on the major trends of 2008. We cover new products, financings and exits across a variety of technology sectors: search, social networking, cloud computing, mobile communications, advertising and ecommerce, consumer media and entertainment, consumer electronics and clean technology.
Below is a portion of the executive summary and key statistical highlights for all to read. → Read More
Greek startup AskMarkets, which lets users create and participate in non-cash prediction markets of any kind, has created a prediction market for startups in CrunchBase.
The application lets users bet on the chances any particular startup will be acquired, get additional funding or head to the deadpool in the next year. An example: users say Animoto has a 51.5% chance of being acquired, a 25% chance of being funded and a 23.4% chance of deadpooling. I bought some shares of “get acquired” because I love this startup’s focus on on making one product perfectly while competitors wander. → Read More
CrunchBase, our free database of startup and people information, continues to grow thanks to countless additions and corrections by the community. The site now has entries on 20,000 people, 10,000 companies and over 1,000 venture funds.
The majority of content is added by the community (CrunchBase has wiki features to allow unlimited versioning control to step back if bad entries are made). When an important deal or milestone about a person or startup is reported on any site, people add it to Crunchbase for others to find. → Read More
Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.
Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.
We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.
Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date. → Read More
Tim O’Reilly is tearing his hair out because he thinks that we link too much to CrunchBase, our startup database. He levels the unforgivable charge of self-linking at us, and puts us in the same company as the New York Times (which in this case is not a good thing). In his post (which I link to above), he makes the following connection between how we link to Crunchbase and how the New York Times constantly links to itself: Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results). Tim is simply confused here. We’re not nearly as bad as the New York Times, which I agree generally does a really poor job of linking to any authority other than itself. (But it depends where you look. Some of its blogs are linking out more and more. Maybe the rest of the paper will take notice). Moreover, company links on TechCrunch are usually not the most prominent link in any given post. Most posts include other outbound links to other blogs, news articles, press releases, and the like. As far as CrunchBase is concerned, we have no hard and fast rules for linking to company profiles there. Sometimes we link to the CrunchBase profile, sometimes we link directly to the company’s site. More often than not, we do both. Sometimes we’re lazy or pressed for time, and only link to one or (gasp) none at all. But my preferred method, for instance, is to link the company logo in a post to the CrunchBase profile and link the first mention of the company in a post to its Website. Am I ruining the Web by doing that? I thought more information was better. Yet O’Reilly warns ominously about self-linking: When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an → Read More
Since launching the CrunchBase API less than two weeks ago we’ve seen a great response from developers, who have already developed a number of impressive plugins and applications. The CrunchBase API offers access to information from thousands of tech companies, VCs and startup entrepreneurs. It’s free to use, there are no accounts to sign up for and no request throttling. The API returns clean, pretty-printed JSON, and only basic attribution is required. Here are some of great applications already in the wild: CrunchBase WordPress Plugins Two plugins sprung up that make it easy to insert the CrunchBase widget into WordPress blog posts. The first, developed by Vaibhav Gadodia, queries the CrunchBase API to determine the CrunchBase URL for a company. Joost de Valk, the author of numerous WordPress plugins, also released a CrunchBase widget plugin that supports all of the CrunchBase entity types (companies, products, people, and financial organizations). CrunchBase Social Graphs Finnish readers Mikko Kivelä and Bemmu Sepponen have generated whopper social graphs using the full web of CrunchBase data. One of the graphs maps company connections in CrunchBase, while the other is concerned with the people involved. They also created a fun text file that counts the degrees of separation from any company to Google (TechCrunch is 2 away). We’d love to see a version of They Rule using financial organizations instead of board members. Semantic CrunchBase Quite possibly the most exciting use of the CrunchBase API is Semantic CrunchBase, a RDF/SPARQL mirror of CrunchBase that adheres to the principles of the Semantic Web. Semantic CrunchBase comes to us from active Semantic/RDF community developer Benjamin Nowack. A RDF/SPARQL interface enables queries to be run against the CrunchBase data. For example, you can query for all the companies that were funded during January 2008 (which you can already do via a web interface with our advanced search page). Semantic CrunchBase is a great add-on that will open up new doors with respect to the applications people can create with CrunchBase data. If you are doing something cool with CrunchBase data we’d love to see it. Become a member and post on the CrunchBase Google Group. Follow us on Twitter. Subscribe to the CrunchBase Blog. CrunchBase Information CrunchBase Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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