Crunchbase alternatives for company data licensing

If you are choosing a company database to license for a product, a model or a research process, start by sorting the candidates by the question each one answers. Crunchbase answers who funded a private company, in which round, when and alongside whom. Fokals answers what a company is doing now: the roles it opens, the technologies it adopts, the markets it enters, the capital it reports raising and what it announces, each a dated observation on one company index. The two kinds of record join on a company key, and the last sections of this guide show how.

This guide sets out what Crunchbase licenses and on what terms, what each product is built for, what Fokals delivers on private funding, and four other databases. Every statement about another company was checked against its own public pages, or its owner's filings, on 4 October 2026 and is linked. Fokals is delivered direct, by REST API and as bulk files, which you load into your own systems.

What Crunchbase licenses

Crunchbase's API documentation describes round-by-round funding data, firmographics, private market insights and predictive company intelligence. Its packages overview divides them into three:

• Fundamentals. Company profiles with firmographics such as name, type, legal status, employee count and key leadership, and financials: funding stages, round history, valuations and investor details.
• Insights. Analyses of past and present private market activity.
• Predictions. Forecasts of funding rounds, exits, growth, layoffs and closures.

The data dictionary for its API and CSV products lists the entities it covers: organisations, people, funding rounds, investments, acquisitions, IPOs, funds and events, with layoffs, key employee changes, product launches and partnership announcements among the rest.

On sources, its data page names five: what companies, investors and partners submit directly, among them its venture partners and contributors; the research behaviour of its users, aggregated and anonymised; automated collection from external sources; news outlets and government filings; and review by its own researchers.

Delivery is by REST API or bulk CSV export, according to its Build Your Product page. The documentation also describes an MCP server that connects AI assistants directly to live Crunchbase data.

A product team should read the licence before the schema. Crunchbase's Data Access Terms, effective 26 November 2024, grant a limited licence to use its API and the data described in the licensee's order form, solely as the order form sets out. Unless the order form expressly authorises it, they bar using the Crunchbase materials to train models, generative artificial intelligence included. A licence agreement in the same documentation is dated 29 May 2017 and lists four access types. It says that Enterprise Access is for internal research and analysis: the licensee may publish analysis and aggregate statistics derived from the data, with attribution and a link to Crunchbase, and may not distribute the data itself to third parties. The other three are Venture Program Access, for members of its Venture Program, for managing a portfolio and sourcing investments; Crunchbase for Applications, which covers commercial use under a separate agreement arranged by enquiry; and a 2013 snapshot under a Creative Commons attribution licence. The documentation's overview draws a line in product terms: Data Enrichment feeds internal systems and models, and Data Licensing puts the data into customer-facing products.

What Crunchbase is built for

Each line restates the pages linked above.

• Funding history. Round by round: funding stages, round history, valuations and investor details, in its Fundamentals package.
• The entities of private markets. Organisations, people, funding rounds, investments, acquisitions, IPOs, funds and events, as its data dictionary lists them.
• Predictions. Forecasts of funding rounds, exits, growth, layoffs and closures. Its home page describes models trained on nearly two decades of private market data.
• Two licensed uses. Data Enrichment for internal systems and models, and Data Licensing for customer-facing products.
• AI assistants. An MCP server that connects them directly to live Crunchbase data.

Why teams look for an alternative

The reasons are about fit, and each is a question to put to any vendor, Fokals included.

• Scope. You need to know what a company is doing now: the roles it opens, the tools it adopts, the markets it enters, what it announces. That is a different record from who financed it.
• Licence fit. Your use is embedding records in a product or passing them to your own customers, and you need the agreement or order form that names that use. The piece on what a data licence covers lists what to settle before signing.
• Delivery. Your pipeline wants a feed it can resume from a bookmark, or files it can load each night, in a format it already reads.
• Dated observations. Your model is built on dated observations of what companies do, one record for each posting opened or tool adopted, written once and never revised.
• Security identifiers. Your research joins on ticker, ISIN, LEI or FIGI, and needs each brand tied to its listed parent.

Crunchbase and Fokals side by side

Each cell restates what the vendor says publicly about its scope, sources, delivery and licensing.

What Fokals delivers on private funding

Company Funding, part of the intent dataset, delivers the private capital raises that operating companies report in regulatory filings. Each record gives the filing date, whether it is a new notice or an amendment, the issuer's legal name and CIK, the amount offered and the amount sold in US dollars, the date of first sale, and the detail of the offering: the exemptions claimed, the securities offered, the number of investors and the minimum investment. The filing follows the first sale of an offering, so it is an early, dated public record of a private raise.

Four properties of the record decide how to read it.

1. A record is the raise as the company reported it. The amounts are the company's own figures on the day it filed: what it offered, what it had sold and when the first sale took place.
2. An amendment is flagged. An amendment restates an earlier notice, so select new notices when you sum amounts, as the query below does.
3. Entity resolution is exact. A raise is tied to a company ID when the issuer resolves to exactly one company in the index. Every record carries the issuer's legal name and CIK, so the whole feed can also be matched to the companies you track.
4. The announced record sits beside the filed one. Company News, in the announcements dataset, delivers company announcements and regulatory disclosures classified into 13 event types, a funding round among them. A raise a company announces itself appears there with its date.

A worked query: recently funded and hiring

A reported raise is most useful as a date to join other evidence to. The query lists companies that reported a new raise in a period you choose, with their open postings on its last day and the postings opened over the 28 days to it, both from Hiring Activity. Set the two parameters to the first and last closed days of the period.

with hiring as (
  select
    company_id,
    day,
    open_postings,
    sum(new_postings) over (
      partition by company_id
      order by day
      rows between 27 preceding and current row
    ) as new_28d
  from company_hiring_daily
)
select
  f.company,
  f.filed_at,
  f.amount_sold,
  h.open_postings,
  h.new_28d
from company_funding f
join hiring h
  on h.company_id = f.company_id
 and h.day = :as_of
where f.form = 'D'
  and f.filed_at between :since and :as_of
order by f.amount_sold desc nulls last;

Acme Robotics, an invented company, might appear with a raise reported three weeks before the last day of the period, 8 million US dollars sold, 34 open postings and 21 postings opened in the last 28 days. The figures are illustrative. A raise followed by new postings on that scale shows the money going into people, and the breakdown by job function in Hiring Activity says into which teams. The join keeps the raises resolved to a company ID, which is where the hiring evidence attaches. The guide to following private funding through regulatory filings treats amendments and exemptions in full, and sourcing private companies for venture capital builds a complete screen.

Other databases for funding and investors

Four other vendors publish descriptions of private-market coverage. None was tested for this guide: each line says only what the vendor, or for PitchBook its owner, states.

• PitchBook. The 2025 annual report of Morningstar, its owner, says PitchBook's data covers private and public companies, investors, funds, deals, loans and executives, and reaches clients mainly through the PitchBook platform, with direct data products by API and data feed. The guide to PitchBook alternatives covers it.
• Dealroom. Dealroom describes data on startups, their founders and their funding, used by investors, corporates and governments, and offers an API in early access.
• CB Insights. CB Insights describes APIs and data feeds with profiles of private companies, public companies and investors, funding deals, cap table history, M&A and IPOs.
• Tracxn. Tracxn lists private companies with their funding rounds, acquisitions, investors, financials and cap tables, and describes uses for investors, corporates, government agencies, industry bodies and universities.

Choosing by the question

A team can license both kinds. To join them, match your company list to Fokals by domain matching: each website domain resolves to the stable company ID that every dataset carries, and a listed company's records also carry ticker, MIC, ISIN, LEI and FIGI. Fokals licenses by written agreement for internal use, embedding in a product or redistribution, as the data licensing page sets out, and sends sample data for the companies you track on request with the data dictionary and methodology.

Frequently asked questions

The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.

What this page says about the products it names was checked against their public documentation on 4 October 2026. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners. Fokals is not affiliated with them or endorsed by them.