Startup Funding Rounds Scraper

Collect recent startup funding rounds from public TechCrunch, Crunchbase News, and FinSMEs announcements. The Actor turns scattered startup funding news into typed records with company, disclosed amount, round, investors, publication date, headline, and source URL. Use it for recurring investor research, sales signals, market intelligence, or a one-time funding dataset.

The Actor is an announcement monitor, not a private company database. It reads public news surfaces and never requires a Crunchbase login or API key.

What does Startup Funding Rounds Scraper do?

Startup Funding Rounds Scraper:

• checks public funding-news feeds from three selected publications;
• recognizes company-specific financing announcements;
• excludes common listicles, trackers, and aggregate trend articles;
• normalizes compact amounts such as $25M to 25000000 when the currency is USD;
• extracts stages such as Seed, Series A, Series B, growth, and debt when stated;
• captures named lead investors when they appear in the public summary;
• applies source, date, keyword, amount, and result-count filters;
• deduplicates records and sorts the newest announcements first;
• saves integration-ready JSON to the default Apify dataset.

This cross-source feed differs from company-profile search tools: its primary record is a newly published funding event.

Who is it for?

Investors and venture teams

Create a current sourcing feed, identify companies entering a new stage, and route selected announcements into a research queue.

B2B sales and partnerships teams

Use recently funded companies as time-sensitive account signals for outreach, enrichment, or territory planning.

Analysts and researchers

Build a repeatable public-news dataset without manually copying funding announcements from several publications.

Data and automation teams

Schedule the Actor and deliver normalized rows to a warehouse, spreadsheet, webhook, or downstream Actor.

Which public sources are supported?

Input value	Publication	Coverage
techcrunch	TechCrunch Venture	Company-specific venture and startup financing announcements in the public feed
crunchbase-news	Crunchbase News	Public funding reporting and indexed company-round announcements
finsmes	FinSMEs	Company funding announcements from the public feed or its indexed public-news surface

Select one source for a focused workflow or all three for broader monitoring. Source availability and editorial frequency vary. The Actor does not claim every private transaction or every funding event worldwide.

What startup funding round data is extracted?

Field	Type	Meaning
company	string	Company named as raising or receiving financing
round	string or null	Reported stage or financing type
amount	string or null	Amount as written by the publication
amountUsd	number or null	Normalized value for USD-denominated amounts
currency	string or null	Detected USD, EUR, or GBP code
investors	string[]	Lead investors explicitly stated in the available summary
announcedAt	ISO string	Publication time of the announcement
source	string	Stable source key
sourceName	string	Publication name
sourceUrl	string	Public article or indexed announcement URL
headline	string	Original funding-news headline
summary	string or null	Public feed summary, when available
scrapedAt	ISO string	Time the Actor normalized the item

Nullable fields stay null rather than being guessed. An empty investors array means the available public feed text did not state a lead investor.

How to run the Actor

1. Open Startup Funding Rounds Scraper in Apify Console.
2. Choose one or more news sources.
3. Set maxItems to the maximum newest matching records you need.
4. Optionally add a date, company/topic keywords, or a minimum disclosed USD amount.
5. Click Start.
6. Open the Dataset tab to inspect, download, or integrate the results.
7. For ongoing monitoring, schedule the same Task and process newly observed source URLs downstream.

The prefilled input uses all supported sources and completes without credentials or a proxy setting.

Input parameters

sources

Array of one or more supported source keys. Defaults to all three publications. Duplicate source values are rejected by the input schema.

maxItems

Maximum newest records saved after filtering and deduplication. Allowed range: 1–1,000. The default is 100.

sinceDate

Optional ISO 8601 date or timestamp. Only announcements published on or after this value are returned. Use an absolute date so scheduled Tasks remain reproducible.

keywords

Optional list of case-insensitive company or topic terms. Terms are matched against company names, headlines, and available summaries. Short terms such as AI are matched as whole words to avoid accidental substring matches.

minAmountUsd

Optional non-negative USD threshold. When set, non-USD announcements and records without a disclosed USD amount are excluded. No currency conversion is inferred.

Example input

{
  "sources": ["techcrunch", "crunchbase-news", "finsmes"],
  "keywords": ["AI"],
  "minAmountUsd": 10000000,
  "maxItems": 50
}

This workflow returns public AI-related announcements with a disclosed USD amount of at least $10 million.

Example output

{
  "company": "June AI",
  "round": "Pre-Seed",
  "amount": "$20M",
  "amountUsd": 20000000,
  "currency": "USD",
  "investors": [],
  "announcedAt": "2026-07-31T07:00:00.000Z",
  "source": "finsmes",
  "sourceName": "FinSMEs",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.finsmes.com/2026/07/june-ai-raises-20m-in-pre-seed-funding.html",
  "headline": "June AI Raises $20M in Pre-Seed Funding",
  "summary": "June AI Raises $20M in Pre-Seed Funding FinSMEs",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-11T06:45:00.000Z"
}

Publication data changes over time, so current runs will return different companies and dates.

How much does it cost to monitor startup funding rounds?

Pricing has two events:

• one start event for each run;
• one item event for each funding-round record saved.

At the current FREE-tier prices of $0.005 per start and $0.0092 per item:

Saved records	Example event cost
1	$0.0142
25	$0.2350
100	$0.9250

Paid Apify plans receive the tier price shown in Console. The Actor does not charge the item event for filtered, duplicate, failed, or empty records. Apify platform usage rules and rounding still apply.

Monitoring and change-detection workflow

A scheduled run produces a fresh dataset rather than mutating an old global dataset. For reliable monitoring:

1. save sourceUrl as the stable event identity in your destination;
2. schedule the Actor daily or at the interval appropriate for your team;
3. upsert rows by sourceUrl or by source, company, amount, and publication date;
4. notify only on identities not seen in earlier runs;
5. enrich selected companies in a separate workflow when deeper company data is needed.

The Actor does not persist a private cross-run seen-item list. This keeps each run deterministic and avoids mixing datasets between users.

Export startup funding companies to a spreadsheet

From the Dataset tab, download JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or another supported Apify format. For an automated spreadsheet workflow:

1. schedule the Actor;
2. connect the run dataset to Make, Zapier, n8n, or your own webhook consumer;
3. map company, amount, round, announcedAt, and sourceUrl columns;
4. deduplicate on sourceUrl in the destination;
5. add CRM ownership or research status columns downstream.

API usage with cURL

Set APIFY_TOKEN in your environment and run:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~startup-funding-rounds-monitor/runs?waitForFinish=300" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sources":["finsmes"],"maxItems":20}'

Fetch dataset items using the defaultDatasetId returned by the run. Do not place long-lived tokens in source code or public URLs.

JavaScript API example

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('automation-lab/startup-funding-rounds-monitor').call({
  sources: ['techcrunch', 'crunchbase-news', 'finsmes'],
  maxItems: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python API example

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ['APIFY_TOKEN'])
run = client.actor('automation-lab/startup-funding-rounds-monitor').call(
    run_input={
        'sources': ['techcrunch', 'crunchbase-news', 'finsmes'],
        'keywords': ['AI'],
        'maxItems': 50,
    }
)
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
print(items)

Use with Apify MCP

Add the Actor to Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http apify \
  "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/startup-funding-rounds-monitor"

For Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code, add this equivalent MCP server JSON in the client's MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/startup-funding-rounds-monitor"
    }
  }
}

Example prompts:

• “Run the startup funding rounds monitor for all sources and return the 25 newest announcements.”
• “Collect current FinSMEs funding announcements and summarize disclosed amounts by round.”
• “Find public AI funding rounds above $10 million and prepare rows for my sourcing sheet.”

Integrations

Useful destinations include:

• Apify webhooks for run-completion notifications;
• Make, Zapier, or n8n for no-code routing;
• Google Sheets or Airtable for analyst review;
• BigQuery, Snowflake, or PostgreSQL for historical analysis;
• a CRM enrichment workflow for selected newly funded accounts;
• Slack or email alerts generated by your own downstream automation.

The output uses the default dataset for straightforward compatibility.

Accuracy, limits, and failure behavior

• The Actor monitors public announcements; it is not a complete funding database.
• Editorial feeds can be delayed, changed, or temporarily unavailable.
• Amount and round fields are extracted only when the source text states them clearly.
• amountUsd is populated only for USD text; EUR and GBP are not converted.
• Investor extraction depends on an explicit “led by” phrase in available feed text.
• Some source summaries contain only a headline, so investors can be empty.
• One unavailable source does not discard useful records from other selected sources.
• If every selected source fails, the run fails instead of returning a misleading successful empty dataset.
• A valid query with no matches succeeds with zero dataset items and no item charge.
• The Actor uses bounded direct HTTP requests and does not expose a paid proxy mode.

Tips for better results

• Use one source when source consistency matters more than breadth.
• Keep sinceDate close to your monitoring interval for smaller downstream diffs.
• Use specific company or sector keywords rather than very broad two-letter fragments.
• Apply minAmountUsd only when excluding undisclosed and non-USD rounds is acceptable.
• Set maxItems above expected daily volume when scheduling, so the cap does not hide older matching announcements.
• Treat sourceUrl as provenance and verify material investment decisions against the publication.

Responsible and legal use

This Actor accesses public news surfaces. You are responsible for using the data in accordance with applicable laws, source terms, privacy rules, and your organization's policies. Do not use funding news to make unlawful discriminatory decisions, send abusive outreach, or misrepresent inferred facts as source statements. Respect publication attribution and keep sourceName and sourceUrl with derived datasets. For consequential investment or compliance decisions, verify the original announcement and other primary sources.

Troubleshooting

Why did the Actor return zero records?

Check whether your sinceDate, keywords, minimum amount, and selected source combination is too restrictive. Remove filters one at a time. A zero-item run can be correct and does not incur item events.

Why is amountUsd null?

The announcement may omit an amount or use a non-USD currency. The Actor does not silently convert EUR or GBP values. Use the original amount and currency fields when available.

Why is the investor list empty?

The public feed summary did not explicitly identify a lead investor in a supported phrase. Open sourceUrl for full article context rather than treating an empty list as “no investors.”

What happens when a publication blocks a feed?

The Actor classifies access challenges separately from valid empty feeds. For FinSMEs, it can use a public FinSMEs-restricted indexed news surface. If one source fails, other selected sources can still produce records; if all fail, the run fails.

Frequently asked questions

Does this scrape private Crunchbase data?

No. It reads public Crunchbase News reporting and does not use private company profiles, a login, or a Crunchbase API key.

Can it monitor a list of exact company domains?

Not directly. Use keywords for public headline/summary matching or join the output to a separate company-enrichment workflow.

Does it send alerts by itself?

No. Schedule the Actor and connect run completion or dataset rows to an Apify webhook, integration platform, or your own notification service.

Are funding amounts guaranteed?

No. Amounts are nullable because some publications describe investments without disclosing a figure. The Actor preserves the source wording and avoids estimating missing values.

Related automation-lab Actors

• Crunchbase Company and Funding Search Scraper for public company-profile and funding-search workflows.
• TheHub Nordic Startup Directory Scraper for Nordic startup directory research.
• Tracxn Startup & Company Intelligence Scraper for URL-driven public company intelligence.

Use this Actor when the buyer job starts with newly published funding events; use a related company Actor when the job starts with company profiles or directory discovery.