Crunchbase News Scraper

Turn Crunchbase News into a structured dataset. This Actor scrapes news.crunchbase.com — Crunchbase's editorial desk covering funding rounds, M&A, IPOs, layoffs, unicorns and venture-capital moves — and returns clean JSON you can drop into a spreadsheet, database, CRM or AI pipeline. Filter by keyword, category, tag and publish date; optionally pull the full article text.

No login, no API key, no CAPTCHAs — just reliable, well-structured article data.

Who it's for

You are…	You use this to…
VC / PE analyst	Monitor daily funding & M&A coverage; build a date-filtered deal-flow feed
Sales / lead-gen	Surface companies that just raised (venture/seed/funding categories) as warm outbound leads
Researcher / journalist	Assemble topic archives (AI, fintech, crypto, cybersecurity) and startup-trend datasets
Content / SEO team	Track competitor coverage, authors and headlines over time

What you get — output fields

Field	Type	Description
article_id	integer	Stable article identifier
url	string	Canonical article URL
slug	string	URL slug
title	string	Headline (entities decoded)
excerpt	string	Short summary / dek (plain text)
date_published	string	Publish datetime (site local, ISO-8601)
date_published_gmt	string	Publish datetime (UTC)
date_modified	string	Last-modified datetime
author_names	array	Author display names
author_slugs	array	Author slugs
category_names	array	Category names (e.g. Venture, Artificial intelligence, M&A)
category_slugs	array	Category slugs (e.g. venture, ai, ma)
tag_names	array	Tag names
tag_slugs	array	Tag slugs
featured_image_url	string	Lead image URL
seo_description	string	SEO / OpenGraph description
content_html	string	Full article HTML (when “Include full article text” is on)
content_text	string	Full article plain text (when enabled)
word_count	integer	Body word count (when enabled)
scraped_at	string	UTC timestamp of the scrape

High-value use cases

• Deal-flow monitoring — schedule a daily run of categories: ["venture", "seed"] with dateFrom = yesterday to capture every new funding story.
• Warm-lead generation — filter the funding categories, then push title/url/date_published into your CRM as "recently funded" signals.
• Sector research — pull the entire ai or fintech-ecommerce archive with includeContent: true for text mining, summarization or embeddings.
• Competitive/author tracking — group by author_names and category_slugs to see who covers what, and how often.
• Newsletter / alerting — keyword-search (e.g. "acquisition") on a schedule and forward new hits via webhook.

Input parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	—	Full-text search across title and body
categories	array	—	Category slugs or names; OR-combined (e.g. venture, ai, ma, ipo, seed, crypto, fintech-ecommerce, cybersecurity)
tags	array	—	Tag slugs or names; OR-combined
dateFrom	string	—	Published on/after (ISO date or datetime)
dateTo	string	—	Published on/before (ISO date or datetime)
includeContent	boolean	false	Include full article HTML + plain text + word count
sortBy	enum	date	date or relevance (relevance needs a search keyword)
order	enum	desc	desc (newest first) or asc
maxItems	integer	100	Stop after this many articles
proxyConfiguration	object	off	Optional; not needed (the site is open)

Example input

{
  "searchQuery": "AI funding",
  "categories": ["venture"],
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
  "includeContent": false,
  "sortBy": "date",
  "order": "desc",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example output row

{
  "article_id": 94018,
  "url": "https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biotech-startup-investment-exits-steady-ai-2026/",
  "title": "Biotech Startup Investment Held Steady Even As AI Funding Surged",
  "excerpt": "Venture funding to biotech startups held roughly flat in the first half…",
  "date_published": "2026-08-31T04:00:52",
  "author_names": ["Joanna Glasner"],
  "category_names": ["Artificial intelligence", "Health, Wellness & Biotech", "Venture"],
  "category_slugs": ["ai", "health-wellness-biotech", "venture"],
  "tag_names": ["biotech"],
  "featured_image_url": "https://news.crunchbase.com/wp-content/uploads/concentrated-capital.jpg",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-10T02:38:11+00:00"
}

Scheduling & integrations

• Schedule runs (hourly/daily) from the Apify Console to build a live news feed.
• Webhooks — trigger a downstream service on run completion.
• Integrations — export to Google Sheets, Airtable, S3, or push to Make/Zapier.
• Storage — every run writes a dataset you can pull via the Apify API in JSON, CSV, Excel or RSS.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool for AI agents via the Apify MCP server, so an assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) can fetch Crunchbase News on demand — e.g. "get this week's AI funding articles" — and reason over the structured rows.

Incremental scraping

Pass dateFrom (and optionally dateTo) to pull only articles in a window. For a daily monitor, set dateFrom to the previous run's date and let order: desc surface the newest stories first. The Actor de-duplicates within a run and resumes cleanly if interrupted.

FAQ

Is there a result limit? No hard cap — maxItems controls run size. Crunchbase News has ~8,700 articles total; a single category can exceed 5,000. For very large unfiltered pulls, narrow with a date range (the source paginates up to ~100 pages per query).

How fresh is the data? Live. Each run hits the site's current WordPress API, so you get articles the moment they're published.

Does it need proxies or logins? No. Crunchbase News is a public site with no anti-bot gate — the Actor runs without proxies or credentials.

Is this the same as company/funding profiles? No. This Actor covers Crunchbase News articles, not the company/investor profile database (a separate, license-gated product). If you need company profiles, use a dedicated Crunchbase company Actor.

Is scraping this legal? The Actor collects publicly available editorial content and is intended for research, monitoring and analysis. You are responsible for how you use the data and for complying with Crunchbase's terms and applicable law.

Reliability? The backend is a stable WordPress REST API with retry/backoff and schema-consistent output, so integrations don't break silently. Fatal errors are monitored.