You keep tracking funding news. You rotate through trade press, LinkedIn, and keep listening for signals in your network. Somewhere in that rotation, a busy month swallows your attention whole, and one of the companies in your watchlist closes a Series B. By then, a competitor has already secured a deal; that promising lead is now just a stale row in your CRM.
The Crunchbase API is the tool to let go of manual tracking. With it, you can stop refreshing feeds and let the data come to you instead. And it now includes a range of AI-powered predictions and insights that can help you build relationships before funding happens, so you're the first in line to provide your products and services.
The free API tier is sadly gone, but the new features are well worth the price. Here's everything you need to know to evaluate whether Crunchbase is the best tool for your monitoring and enrichment kit.
Table of contents:
What is the Crunchbase API?
The Crunchbase REST API lets you pull company, funding, and investor data straight into your tools. It now includes predictive intelligence features that can forecast the likelihood of a company getting acquired or funded. The popular free API plan is gone; you need to negotiate pricing with the sales team for the Custom Data Plan, which also includes an MCP connector.
What can you build with the Crunchbase API?
The Crunchbase API used to be all about historical lookup features: you could search for any company and get reliable data, such as investors or revenue range. In the 2025 API relaunch, it added AI-powered features that predict major company milestones, like a funding round, with up to 95% accuracy, per backtesting data. The engine can also predict other major milestones, like acquisitions or closures.
Since the free tier is gone, the value lies in integrating these predictive features into your tools, products, and workflows. Here are some examples:
Deal sourcing and prioritized outreach: You can now search for high-growth companies to build new lists, which is useful for sales, partnerships, or acquisitions.
Funding alerts: Build a watchlist of companies or sectors, and get alerts for major moves in funding and acquisitions. (The API doesn't support webhooks and notifications natively, but you can set up a polling action to fill the gap.)
Competitor M&A monitoring: Keep an eye on competitor companies and major moves in your industry to plan partnerships and company strategy based on real market signals.
CRM enrichment: Push Crunchbase data into your CRM records, offering more context to your sales team, and use the AI-powered signals to identify existing leads who likely have budget for your products and services.
The throughline is the same: the signals that took a team of analysts to turn into actionable insights are now available as a filter. You get the data faster without as much (human) reasoning effort.
Crunchbase API capabilities
Not in the mood to dive into the API docs yet? I went down that rabbit hole to extract the gist of the available features and how to call them before you get into development mode. Here's how things work under the hood.
How to find what you want
The Crunchbase API offers three main ways to look up and interact with data on the platform.
Search for looking up single records or lists. It supports typing full company names, and also adding search constraints for more complex questions, such as "high-growth companies in Berlin."
Entity lookup to get the full record of data on a specific company. This is the go-to if you're polling for changes to a particular company: note down the entity ID, and get an automation tool to check it every day.
Autocomplete is useful when you have incomplete information about a company and you want to check if there's any data on it (for example, you want to know more about Tesla, but the full company name is actually Tesla, Inc). The response tells you what exists that matches your search term; you can then use the entity lookup to get the full record.
Historical data APIs
Need to enrich a lead list or pull together an industry report? This is the functionality Crunchbase has always offered, and it's still available, organized into three tiers that build on each other.
Firmographics surfaces baseline company profiles, people, locations, categories, and jobs.
Core Financials returns firmographics plus investment records of who invested in what.
Advanced Financials goes one step further to add deal history: funding rounds, press references, acquisitions, and more.
Dive into these endpoints in the documentation available here.
AI predictions and insights API
Predictions lets you look into what the future could be like, while Insights helps correlate existing signals to judge the state and direction of a company.
Predictions returns predictions on funding, acquisition, IPO, closure, growth, layoffs, and whether the company will remain private.
Here are some common fields you'll get across as responses:
probability_score(from 0 to 1) predicting how likely the event is to happen.probability_tier, which bundles probabilities into 5 readable categories, from very unlikely (up to 0.05) to very likely (above 0.95).probability_score_timeseries, which shows how the prediction score evolves over the coming months.
Each API response can include the reasoning behind the prediction in extra fields.
Insights has a lot more to give, offering data on:
Growth:
growth_directiontells you if a company is growing, stable, or declining, backed by agrowth_confidencerating and 9 individual signals (headcount,funding_raised, and others), each flagged as worsening or improving.Investor:
exit_success_rateandlead_investor_rateshow how often an investor's bets exit successfully and how often they lead a round rather than just follow, plusmedian_investment_sizeand their typical stage/type/location.Competition: A score tells you how close two companies are, and shows why via overlapping categories or products (
category_overlap,product_similarities).Valuation:
current_valuationplus a lower/upper bound range, scored by anestimate_confidence_tierso you know how much to trust the number.Market: Direction for an industry, backed by reason entries.
You can use the unified Predictions and Insights endpoint that returns both kinds of data, or use them separately if you only want to use a single aspect of the platform.
How to access the Crunchbase API
Direct API calls
The classic way to connect to the Crunchbase API is via direct API calls using a cURL command, running a script, or setting up a no-code connector.
Talk to sales, and negotiate a contract.
Log in to Crunchbase. Go to User settings > Integrations to access your API key.
There are two ways to use the key to authenticate with the platform. (The key is required for a successful call.)
You can pass your key at the end of a URL-based query.
Or as a value to the X-cb-user-key parameter in the API call header.
Point your request to your desired API endpoint based on what action you want to perform (get an autocomplete of company name; search and filter companies; get predictions and insights). Follow the API documentation here.
For example, to get the direct link to the company record of Zapier, use the autocomplete endpoint:
GET https://api.crunchbase.com/v4/data/autocompletes?query=zapier
This will give you the entity name and unique ID that you can use with the entity lookup API endpoint, so you can get the full data record.
Note: the Crunchbase API is rate-limited to 200 calls per minute. Remember to pace the request rate for large projects.
MCP server
The Crunchbase MCP server lets you connect it to any MCP-compatible client, like ChatGPT or Claude. It lets your AI agents browse through the data based on your instructions, so you can research a company, map a market, or analyze investor funding and activity straight from your chat window.
The MCP server is available as an add-on to the Business plan or part of the negotiated Custom Data Access Plan.
Crunchbase API pricing
The free API plan is gone for good. The only way to access the API is to talk to sales to negotiate a Custom Data Access Plan.
If you want to use Crunchbase via its web app, there are two viable options:
Pro starts at $79/month (billed annually), with a 7-day trial. You'll have access to the database, limited data exports, and company activity tracking.
Business at $199/month lets you export more data, includes the Crunchbase AI agent, and you can add the MCP server as an add-on.
Automate Crunchbase with Zapier
If you're planning to stick to the Crunchbase Pro or Business plan, Zapier's Crunchbase integrations can automate your research, passing on company data to 9,000+ apps you use for work. For example, Zapier can automatically send new companies, lists, or saved searches directly to Google Sheets, your CRM, a Slack channel, or wherever else you need them.
Zapier lets you build from wherever you already work—Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or Zapier itself—and turns it into automation that runs on Zapier, with guardrails, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints built in. It's the most reliable way to get your Crunchbase data where you need it.
Crunchbase API alternatives for historical data
If your budget is tight or you just need basic lookups, here are a few free and affordable options:
SEC EDGAR: The SEC's public filing system holds millions of documents from publicly traded companies and private companies looking to raise money. It's a good tool to catch new funding rounds as they're filed, plus issuer info, amount raised, and offering size. It's a raw feed, not a searchable company database. 100% free with no API key; API documentation here.
Crustdata: This is a B2B data platform that gathers company, firmographic, technographic, and web data. It's not free, but it is credit-based, so you don't have to sign a big contract if you only want to use it occasionally.
Apify: If you have time and taste for side projects, Apify helps you deploy scrapers at scale so you can look for the signals on the open web. This is the messier option, but the universe of data that you can find is potentially larger. The free plan offers $5 worth of credits per month.
None of these replace the depth of Crunchbase's paid data, or its newest AI predictions and insights. Still, they might prove useful if you're in a pinch or not committed to using it long-term.
Peeking into probable futures
Crunchbase lost its free historical data endpoint, but it now opens a window into the future of millions of companies. It went from a commodity data broker into a strategic tool to help you plan sales, find suitable partners, and identify valuable companies to acquire.
Get started with the Pro or Business plan for researching within the Crunchbase web app, with Zapier as the automation layer to keep your other work apps up to date. If you're building a custom system or product, it'll cost you—but the new capabilities will help you make better decisions, which will pay off elsewhere.
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