Most Used Startup Databases & How to Find the Best Provider
Startup Database Benchmarking 2024
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Tuesday, I publish “Insights” to digest the most relevant startup research & reports, and every Thursday, I publish “Essays” that cover hands-on insights about data-driven innovation & AI in VC. Follow along to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
Current subscribers: 22,950, +350 since last week
Brought to you by VESTBERRY - Portfolio Intelligence Platform for data-driven VCs
Watch this short video to learn how data-driven VCs automate their monthly portfolio performance reviews using ChatGPT, Vestberry, Slack, and Gmail via make.com! Discover a new way to stay updated on your portfolio's performance and offer support to your portfolio companies when needed, all powered by AI.
According to 50% of DDVCs, the biggest pain point in the process of becoming more data-driven is finding the right tools. To overcome this hurdle, we’ve been building and testing “VC Tool Finder” in closed beta and plan to publicly launch it soon.
The second biggest pain point in becoming more data-driven, as stated by 46% of respondents, is finding the right data sources. To tackle this headache, we published a comprehensive database benchmarking study in 2020 where we compared original startup data with its representation across the most prominent commercial databases including CBInsights, Crunchbase, Dealroom, and Pitchbook.
We looked at various dimensions such as coverage and accuracy across startups included, founders and their academic degrees, funding rounds, round sizes, valuations, and a lot more. The “winners” were VenturesSource, Pitchbook, and Crunchbase.
Since then, a lot has happened. CBInsights acquired VentureSource, Crunchbase raised $ 50M, and most importantly, LLMs and GenAI levelled the playing field for the collection and processing of unstructured data.
In light of these dynamics and the absence of other reliable benchmarking studies, Tom Oechel from TU Munich and I updated my previous study by including new database providers and extending our sample of original data from July 2019 to March 2024. Hereby, we were able to compare sample 1 (1998 until July 2019) with sample 2 (August 2019 until March 2024) and gained unique insights about trends across coverage and accuracy of these providers.
I presented the results at the Data-Driven VC Summit last week and received so much positive feedback and follow-up questions that I decided to share a brief summary with key insights below. If you’d like to learn more, get the full 44-page study with all tables and analyses here.
What Are the Most Used Databases?
As part of the Data-Driven VC Landscape 2024 survey, we asked 276 VCs which startup database they use. Below are the results with multi-selection.