Crunchbase News Scraper

Extract startup, funding, M&A, and tech news articles from news.crunchbase.com — Crunchbase's editorial news site with 8,500+ articles covering venture capital, AI, startups, IPOs, and more. Returns full content, author, date, categories, tags, and featured image.

Features

• 16 output fields per article — flat schema with typed defaults (zero nulls)
• 8,500+ articles indexed — going back years
• Filter by keyword, category, or date
• Public WordPress REST API — no authentication, no proxy, no cookies
• Pagination — walks pages until maxItems reached (100 per page)
• Pre-resolved category and tag names (not just IDs)

Note on Crunchbase Data

The main crunchbase.com site (organization profiles, funding rounds, search) is gated behind login + Cloudflare and cannot be scraped without authenticated session cookies. This scraper instead targets news.crunchbase.com, which runs WordPress and exposes its content via the public REST API. The news site covers most of the same topics (funding rounds, M&A, IPOs, market analysis) as the gated database, just in editorial article form.

Input

Field	Type	Description
search	String	Free-text keyword (searches title + content)
category	String	Category slug to filter by (e.g., venture, startups, ai, crypto, cybersecurity, ipo, ma, web3, saas). Friendly aliases like artificial-intelligence → ai and fintech → fintech-ecommerce are also accepted.
after	String	Only articles published after this date (YYYY-MM-DD or ISO 8601)
maxItems	Integer	Maximum articles to return (default 50, max 1000)

Example Input

{
    "search": "Series A",
    "category": "artificial-intelligence",
    "after": "2026-01-01",
    "maxItems": 100
}

Output

Each article has 16 fields. All fields are always present — empty strings, zero, or empty array as typed defaults, never null.

Identity

Field	Type	Description
id	Integer	Article ID
url	String	Full article URL
slug	String	URL slug
title	String	Article title (HTML stripped)

Content

Field	Type	Description
excerpt	String	Short summary (HTML stripped, ~500 chars)
content	String	Full article content (HTML stripped, truncated to 5,000 chars)

Dates

Field	Type	Description
publishedDate	String	Publication date (ISO 8601)
modifiedDate	String	Last modified date (ISO 8601)

Author & Taxonomy

Field	Type	Description
authorId	Integer	Primary author ID
authorName	String	Primary author name
categoryNames	Array	Category names (e.g., ["AI", "Business"])
categoryIds	Array	Category IDs
tagNames	Array	Tag names

Media

Field	Type	Description
featuredImageUrl	String	Featured image URL
featuredImageId	Integer	Featured image ID

Metadata

Field	Type	Description
scrapedAt	String	ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

FAQ

Q: Do I need a proxy? No. news.crunchbase.com runs WordPress and exposes its REST API publicly at /wp-json/wp/v2/posts. Works directly from datacenter IPs.

Q: How many articles per page? 100 (the WordPress API maximum). The scraper paginates automatically.

Q: How do I find category slugs? Browse to news.crunchbase.com, click any category, and the URL is /category/{slug}/. Verified working slugs (by article volume): venture, startups, business, ai, public, fintech-ecommerce, health-wellness-biotech, cybersecurity, transportation, clean-tech-and-energy, crypto, ma, data, liquidity, ipo, media-entertainment, seed, enterprise, agtech-foodtech, web3, real-estate-property-tech, semiconductors-and-5g, robotics, retail, saas. Friendly aliases (artificial-intelligence, fintech, health, m&a, etc.) are auto-mapped to the canonical slug.

Q: Can I get organization data (logos, funding rounds, etc.)? Not from this scraper. The main crunchbase.com database is gated. This actor scrapes the news site only. Use it when you need editorial commentary, market analysis, and funding-round summaries.

Q: How fresh is the data? news.crunchbase.com publishes new articles daily. The WordPress API serves the live database — new articles appear within minutes of publication.

Use Cases

• Funding round monitoring — track new VC deals via news coverage
• Market analysis — extract content from sector reports (AI, fintech, climate)
• Competitive intelligence — search for mentions of competitors / partners
• Content syndication — feed Crunchbase News into your own newsroom
• Trend tracking — aggregate by tag/category to identify rising topics