written by Michael Yang, Managing Partner, OMERS Ventures
Today, Crunchbase announced a $50M Series D financing led by growth equity firm, Alignment Growth. We doubled down on our initial investment made back in the fall of 2019. Led by Jager McConnell, Crunchbase has evolved into a leader in the account-based prospecting market as its platform now guides the prospector from account discovery to qualification and ultimately through decision-maker outreach.
Many of you reading this are familiar with the long-standing Crunchbase brand. In fact, you may be one of the over 75M unique users who visit the website annually or one of the 10B annual impressions to Crunchbase data syndicated to popular sites like Yahoo! Finance, LinkedIn and NASDAQ. But did you know that over half of the Fortune 500 and thousands of SMBs are represented in the 60,000 paying Crunchbase customer base? It has taken a few years, but Crunchbase is becoming a product-led growth juggernaut and a must-buy solution for sales, recruiting, business development and finance prospectors.
We all know that the capital markets recalibrated in the first half of 2022, and these are challenging times for any start-up to raise capital. That’s why this financing is such a testament to what the team at Crunchbase has achieved and what they are working on.
First, Crunchbase has always been capital efficient — we still have a chunk of the Series C financing in the bank, so Jager never pursued a growth at all costs mentality.
Second, we’ve doubled the employee ranks while going to a remote-first work environment and earned a spot in Inc Magazine’s Best Places to Work, amidst some of the most turbulent times in our society (and we’re still hiring). Lastly, we launched a new software product line that has 5x’d in short order while overall growth continues to chug along through good times and bad. Going forward, be on the lookout for Crunchbase’s Hubspot integration, more machine learning-power recommendations on actionable accounts and contacts for prospectors, and more dashboards and analytics in its SaaS platform.
With this funding, Crunchbase is on a path to profitability. There’s still much to do but with the experienced and tenured team of CRO Neal Patel, CTO Robert Conrad, CMO Shanee Ben-Zur, CFO Marcus Lo and new CPO Kelly Scheib, we believe that Jager has the absolute right crew for the journey. We, at OMERS Ventures, are proud of what Crunchbase has achieved and look forward to continued collaboration.
