It used to be that you had to pay a bunch of money to get basic information about private tech companies, like how much they’ve raised and who they’ve acquired. CrunchBase made that free. And it used to be that you had to spend lots of time and money trying to network your way into some angel investor money. AngelList made that free.
Now, the two have a deal.
Here are the basics. If you have a company on AngelList, you can choose to sync it with CrunchBase — once a day, any public information you provide will automatically be exported over to your CrunchBase company profile. This will save you time entering the data in both places and help CrunchBase offer a more comprehensive data set for the public. The setup here is similar to the CrunchBase Venture Program, where more than 240 investment outfits provide public updates about their portfolios in exchange for better access to the CrunchBase API and team.
This feature has been in testing for a week, and more than 300 AngelList companies have already opted in, so the teams working on the feature expect it’ll be pretty popular.
Meanwhile, CrunchBase is linking back to AngelList for every company that has an entry in both places (example here). One link will go to their main AngelList page, which could be particularly useful for companies that are actively fundraising, and the other link will direct CrunchBase users to the company’s AngelList job listings page. While the teams aren’t disclosing a revenue-sharing agreement around the job listings part, I’ve learned that there is one.
“We’re putting up the scaffoldings of the marketplace,” AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant tells me. “The startup ecosystem is getting mature enough that it’s able to interconnect with APIs — like how stock markets, financial data service providers and analyst firms work for public companies.” He cites Mattermark and Dashboard.io as two startups using all this publicly accessible data on startups to help companies and investors find the right partners.
“Hiding your data makes no sense when investors are using services like AngelList to find companies,” adds CrunchBase president Matt Kaufman. “We intend for CrunchBase to be the common data platform here, because we think greater transparency will help everybody make better decisions.”
Expect lots more to come from both organizations. Ravikant has been busy angling AngelList to take advantage of the new changes in crowdfunding among other initiatives. Meanwhile, CrunchBase is working on a major new version of the site, which the team says you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months.