A New Private Company Directory Entering the Information Super Highway
November 1, 2019
DarkCyber spotted “Crunchbase Raises $30 Million to Go after Private Companies’ Data.” Business directories can be lucrative. Just track down and old school Dun & Bradstreet senior manager.
The approach taken by Crunchbase, which for a short period of time, was a Verizon property, consists of several parts:
- Tracking information about private companies
- Inclusion of information that will make the directory like LinkedIn, the Microsoft job hunting and social networking site
- A modern-day service able to host corporate Web sites (maybe a 21st city Geocities?). The idea is to capture “partnership and careers pages.”
The write up describes Crunchbase as “one of the largest publicly accessible repositories of data about private companies.”
We learned:
Crunchbase partners with more than 4,000 data suppliers that provide it with valuable information on startup companies, such as annual revenue or burn rate.
Oracle provides a data marketplace and Amazon may be spinning up its streaming data marketplace. Will Crunchbase partner, compete, or sell to either of these companies?
Once in a while, DarkCyber looks up a company on Crunchbase. The experience is a “begging for dollars” journey. The useful information has been trimmed in order to get DarkCyber to sign up for hundreds of dollars to look up information about a private company easily findable elsewhere. A good source are Web sites of the outfits pumping cash into startups, tweets, and discussion groups.
Can the $30 million succeed where other directories have found themselves operated by trade associations or intelligence software equipped with a data base of open source information?
Worth watching. We know the investors have their eyes open as will Cengage, possibly the proud producers of Ward’s Business Directory of US Private and Public Companies.
Stephen E Arnold, November 1, 2019
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