There are dozens of startup data providers and they all look the same. But are they?Different data providers have different strengths and weaknesses. In order to understand these, we compare detailed and verified original information on 460 actual financing rounds from 554 investors in 161 different companies, with their representation across Capital IQ, CB Insights, Crunchbase, Dealroom, Pitchbook, Preqin, Tracxn, and VentureXpert.

Download startup database benchmarking report

01.

Struggling to find the right startup data source?

Finding the right data source for startup data is the second biggest pain point for investors.Venture capitalists face difficulties in evaluating commercial databases due to a crowded vendor landscape, a lack of comparative benchmarks, and non-transparent pricing.

Too Many Options

There is a broad spectrum of startup data providers such as CB Insights, Crunchbase, Dealroom, Pitchbook, Tracxn, or VentureXpert, as well as more modern one-stop-shop providers like Harmonic, Specter, or Synaptic that process raw data into valuable signals.Looking at the different websites, hower, they all sound the same and it's impossible to cut through the noise. Which one should you buy?

02.

Startup Database Benchmarking

To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale startup database benchmarking study and published it in 2020 as an academic paper.Since then, the world has moved on and the data landscape drastically changed. CBInsights acquired VentureSource, Crunchbase raised $ 50M, and most importantly, LLMs and GenAI levelled the playing field for the collection and processing of unstructured data.Therefore, we decided to update our study in 2024 with an even larger sample and fresh data.

Most used databases

First off, we asked 276 VC firms which traditional databases they use. Here, we excluded more modern providers like Harmonic, Specter, and Synaptic.

Our approach

While penetration is a good indicator for quality, we don't take it for granted and conduct an unbiased benchmarking.As always in life, there's no one size fits all.Different data providers have different strengths and weaknesses. In order to understand these, we compare detailed and verified proprietary information on 460 actual financing rounds from 554 investors in 161 different companies, with data included in eight frequently used VC databases.In short, we compare original startup data with their representation across commercial database providers.

Coverage and accuracy