Crunchbase

Crunchbase

· #391 most-used

Private-company intelligence for every agent that touches pipeline

CRMSalesMarketingDatabaseAnalyticsLead Generation

Crunchbase is the leading platform for private-company intelligence, providing deep data on companies, founders, funding rounds, investors, acquisitions, and key people across the global startup ecosystem. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can search organisations and people by any filter, retrieve funding histories, monitor saved lists for new additions, watch saved searches for emerging companies, and route enriched company profiles into your CRM, pipeline tools, and outreach sequences — all without manually browsing the Crunchbase dashboard.

Average time saved
10 hours
per person · per month
≈ 1 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Agents eliminate the manual cycle of searching Crunchbase, copying company and funding data into CRMs or spreadsheets, and monitoring lists for new entries that match prospect criteria.

Schedule

What your Crunchbase agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs
7Agents at work
24/7Always on
Agents
TueThu
Tue
Wed
Thu
7a
8a
9a
10a
11a
12p
1p
2p
3p
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5p
6p
Multi-app workflows

Crunchbase × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows
6Apps spanned
~17 hrsSaved / week
6Personas served
For sales
Featured3 apps

Newly funded company to enriched CRM account in one minute

When a company newly matches the funding saved search, the agent fetches the full profile and funding history from Crunchbase, creates or updates the HubSpot company record with current firmographics and round details, and posts a rich Slack alert — all within about a minute of the Crunchbase update. Reps see new funded accounts before the news hits TechCrunch.

~5 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow
Trigger·When a company newly matches the 'Series A in target vertical' Crunchbase saved search
Result
Create or update Company record with firmographics, funding amount, and lead investorPost enriched funding alert to #new-accounts channel with company name, raise, and investor
The win
Saved per run
20 min
Runs / week
~15×
Pipeline populated with newly funded prospects before any manual sourcing begins
Driven bySales Agent
ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

  • Sales
    120 min / week
    Manual prospect research on Crunchbase

    Reps spend 15–30 minutes per account searching Crunchbase, copying firmographic data, and pasting it into the CRM — and the research is stale by the time the deal moves.

    Sales Agent
    0 min
    Agent builds and enriches accounts automatically

    When a company matches the ICP saved search, the agent creates the HubSpot account with current firmographics and funding data within about a minute — no rep research needed.

  • Marketing
    30 min / week
    Quarterly ABM list refresh from export

    The marketing team exports a Crunchbase list, cleans it in a spreadsheet, and uploads it to the ABM tool once a quarter — the list is outdated within weeks of the refresh.

    Marketing Agent
    0 min
    Agent refreshes the ABM segment every Tuesday

    The agent searches Crunchbase weekly, enriches each result, and appends new qualifying companies to the ABM segment — the list is always within a week of current Crunchbase data.

  • Customer Support
    20 min / week
    Manual company verification for inbound tickets

    Support agents manually Google company names in tickets, sometimes finding the wrong company or an outdated profile — leading to misrouted or under-informed responses.

    Customer Support Agent
    0 min
    Agent validates company name against Crunchbase before first response

    The agent resolves each inbound company name to its canonical Crunchbase record and attaches verified firmographic data to the ticket before a rep opens it.

  • Human Resources
    40 min / week
    Manual startup employer background checks

    Recruiters Google each startup listed on a candidate's CV to verify it exists and assess its credibility — a process that takes 10–20 minutes per candidate and often yields outdated information.

    Human Resources Agent
    0 min
    Agent verifies employer history against Crunchbase automatically

    When a candidate reaches the final stage, the agent retrieves their Crunchbase person profile, verifies each employer, and delivers a verified brief to the hiring manager before the interview.

  • Finance
    90 min / week
    Manual weekly funding round tracking

    The finance team monitors newsletters, TechCrunch, and LinkedIn to compile a weekly funding landscape — missing deals announced outside their usual sources and always running a day or more behind.

    Finance Agent
    0 min
    Agent compiles the weekly deal landscape from Crunchbase automatically

    Every Monday the agent searches Crunchbase for the week's funding rounds and acquisitions in the target vertical, logs them to the tracker, and posts a digest to Slack — before the team starts their week.

  • Operations
    60 min / week
    Manual CRM firmographic data maintenance

    Ops runs a quarterly data hygiene sprint, manually checking CRM accounts against current company information and correcting outdated employee counts, locations, and operating statuses.

    Operations Agent
    0 min
    Agent refreshes CRM firmographics from Crunchbase weekly

    The agent checks the top accounts against Crunchbase each Monday, updates drifted fields, and flags acquired or inactive companies for review — data hygiene runs continuously rather than quarterly.

  • Legal
    30 min / week
    Manual counterparty due diligence research

    Legal manually searches Crunchbase, Companies House, and Google for each new contract counterparty — a 20–30 minute process per contract that often gets skipped for smaller agreements.

    Legal Agent
    0 min
    Agent runs Crunchbase due diligence on every new contract

    When a contract enters the legal queue, the agent automatically verifies the counterparty's Crunchbase profile, checks for recent acquisitions, and flags adverse signals before the lawyer opens the file.

+ 100s of other Crunchbase automations
Average time saved
39 hrs / person / month
Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size
5 people
Hourly rate
$75 / hr
Hours saved / week
13
Hours saved / year
625
Annual ROI
$46,875

Based on Crunchbase's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~2.5 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug Crunchbase into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

Authenticate with your Crunchbase API key. All Crunchbase API plans (Basic and above) issue a user key from the Data portal — paste it in and Actionist connects immediately.

1
Sign in to Crunchbase Data

Go to data.crunchbase.com and sign in with the account that holds your API subscription.

2
Copy your API key

Navigate to Settings → API Keys. Copy the user_key shown there. Keep it secret — it grants read access to your subscription tier.

3
Paste into Actionist

Find Crunchbase in the Apps tab, select API key, paste the key, and click Test connection. Actionist runs an autocomplete call to confirm access.

Credentials you'll need
API key*
Crunchbase Data portal → Settings → API Keys → copy your user_key
Actions

14 actions your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

4 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

Skills

Skills that pair with Crunchbase

Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.

Competitive Intelligence & Market Research

B2B SaaS competitive intelligence with 24 scenarios across Sales/HR/Fintech/Ops Tech

MCP servers

MCP servers that work with Crunchbase

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

Data Enrichment & Web Scraper API

Enrich IPs, emails, domains, companies. Scrape SEC, news, jobs, Crunchbase. Bitcoin pay-per-use.

FAQs

Questions about Crunchbase + Actionist

How does Actionist connect to Crunchbase?
Go to the Apps tab, find Crunchbase, and click Connect. You will need a Crunchbase API key — available from the Crunchbase Data portal under Settings → API Keys. Paste your user_key into the API key field and click Test connection. Actionist runs an autocomplete call to verify the key has the correct read access for your subscription tier before any scheduled agent tasks begin.
Which Crunchbase plan do I need to use the API with Actionist?
You need at minimum a Crunchbase Basic plan, which includes API access. The free tier no longer includes API access as of 2025. The Basic plan starts at $49/month and gives read access to organisation and person lookups. The Pro plan at $99/month adds access to funding rounds, acquisitions, investors, and saved search endpoints. Most Actionist workflows for sales and finance use Pro-tier endpoints — if your use case is primarily organisation lookups, Basic is sufficient.
Can Actionist write data back to Crunchbase?
No. The Crunchbase API is read-only — there are no endpoints for creating or modifying Crunchbase records. All Crunchbase actions in Actionist are read operations: searching, looking up entities, retrieving funding rounds, and reading list or saved search contents. The value of the integration is pulling Crunchbase data into your CRM, spreadsheets, or outreach tools — not pushing data back to Crunchbase.
How quickly do Crunchbase triggers fire when a new company appears in my saved search?
Crunchbase triggers in Actionist use polling rather than webhooks. When a new company matches your saved search or is added to a list, the trigger fires within about a minute — Actionist polls the Crunchbase API on a short interval and detects new entries as soon as they appear. The exact lag depends on how frequently Crunchbase updates its index for the triggering event; funding rounds typically appear within hours of the announcement, while other data points may lag by a day.
What is the difference between Search Organizations and Get Saved Search Results?
Search Organizations runs a live, parameterised query against the full Crunchbase database at the time of the call — you pass filters like employee range, funding stage, category, and location and receive a current matching set. Get Saved Search Results retrieves the current result set for a saved search you have already created and named inside Crunchbase. Saved searches are better for continuous monitoring with triggers; Search Organizations is better for on-demand or ad-hoc list building where you want full control of the filters from within your agent workflow.
How do I avoid creating duplicate CRM accounts when Crunchbase returns the same company multiple times?
The best approach is to use Autocomplete Organization first to resolve the company name to its canonical Crunchbase permalink, then use that permalink as a unique key when checking your CRM. Store the Crunchbase permalink as a custom field in HubSpot or your CRM of choice — before creating any new account, the agent checks whether a record with that permalink already exists. This approach handles name variations, legal entity suffixes, and whitespace differences that cause naive name-matching to create duplicates.
Can I build a prospect list from a specific investor's portfolio using Crunchbase and Actionist?
Yes. Use Search Funding Rounds filtered by investor name to retrieve all rounds where that investor participated. For each returned round, call Get Organization for the funded company to retrieve the full profile. The resulting list gives you the investor's portfolio companies with firmographic context. You can then use Search People filtered by company to find the relevant contacts at each portfolio company. This approach works well for warm intro mapping when you share investors with your target accounts.
Does the Crunchbase integration cover all entity types — organizations, people, funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs?
Yes, within the constraints of your Crunchbase subscription tier. Organization and person lookups are available on Basic and above. Funding rounds, acquisitions, investors, IPOs, and saved search endpoints require a Pro or Enterprise tier subscription. Actionist exposes actions for all major entity types, but the API will return an authorization error if you call a Pro endpoint on a Basic subscription — check your subscription tier against the Crunchbase Data pricing page before configuring agents that use funding or acquisition data.