I mentioned this in passing a few weeks ago but given their progress / momentum since then I thought it was worth hitting head-on.
Good decisions are powered by good data and few decision markets have been more opaque than the one for early-stage company financing. Angellist has made a strong recent bid as the transparent marketplace for these financings, but the sleeping giant in this category was Crunchbase, launched by the pre-AOL TechCrunch in the spring of 2007 and loaded with data about every major angel and venture financing round (plus related news links) since then.
It wasn’t clear what would happen to Crunchbase after AOL took it over — the product hadn’t been updated in years and it looked like it might just fade away like so many neglected products do.
But in late 2011, TechCrunch columnist (and now Co-Editor) Eric Eldon wrote a post acknowledging that CrunchBase was a neglected jewel in the TechCrunch crown and vowing to find new ways to integrate its data into the company’s coverage.
Fast forward to April of this year and the announcement of the Crunchbase Venture Program — an open partnership with a long list of the tech indstry’s leading venture firms to make Crunchbase the “database of record” for the venture industry.
And for anyone who was wondering whether Angellist was angling to compete with Crunchbase for this title, today’s announcement of a data-sharing agreement between the two sites has removed any ambiguity about each of their respective roles in bringing greater transparency to every aspect of the early-stage financing business.
Founders Co-op is a member of the Crunchbase Venture Program, and I’ve also been working with the City of Seattle to make Crunchbase the data source for Startup Seattle’s reporting on the health of our early stage ecosystem.
If you’re a startup, an investor in startups, or a supporter of startup ecosystems the message by now should be crystal clear: if you want to get found, get yourself listed in Crunchbase and keep your listing up to date.