Crunchbase Scraper 2026 — Funding & Investors (No Paywall)

Crunchbase Scraper — Funding, Investors & Founders (No Login, No API Key)

Extract company profiles from Crunchbase — funding rounds, investors, founders, employee counts, headquarters, and categories — without a login, paid API, or Crunchbase Pro subscription. Search by keyword to discover companies, or pass a permalink/URL to pull a single company's full profile. Results stream directly to a JSON/CSV dataset you can download or pipe into your own pipeline.

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Why Scrape Crunchbase?

Crunchbase is the de-facto reference for startup funding, M&A activity, founders, and investor networks. The web UI shows the data, but turning that into structured data for your own dashboards, CRM, or research is hard:

• The official Crunchbase API costs $49+/month for the Basic tier and gates the most useful endpoints behind Enterprise pricing.
• Crunchbase Pro locks search beyond a handful of results, blocks bulk export, and rate-limits power users.
• Pages are server-rendered with heavy anti-bot protection (Cloudflare challenges, JS gating, cookie checks). A naive requests.get() returns a challenge page or 403.
• Data is fragmented across cards, tabs, and lazy-loaded sections — funding rounds, key people, recent news, and employee growth all live in different DOM trees.

This actor handles all of that for you. You give it a search query or a company URL; you get back clean structured records ready for analysis.

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What Data You Get

Each company record returns a structured object with:

• Name — the company's display name
• Permalink — Crunchbase slug (e.g. stripe, airbnb)
• URL — direct link to the Crunchbase profile
• Short description — one-line summary
• Full description — long-form company description (company action only)
• Website URL — official company site
• Founded date — year or full date the company was founded
• Location — headquarters city/region
• Employee count range — e.g. "1001-5000"
• Total funding — total capital raised (when public), e.g. "$2.3B"
• Funding rounds — array of rounds with type, amount, date (company action only)
• Investors — array of investor names (company action only)
• Founders — array of founder names (company action only)
• Categories — industry/sector tags, e.g. ["FinTech", "Payments"]

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Use Cases

1. VC deal-flow and sourcing Build a watchlist of startups in a sector and refresh it weekly. Catch new funding announcements before they hit your inbox.

2. Lead generation and ABM Generate target-account lists by industry, headcount, or funding stage. Enrich your CRM with founder names and HQ locations.

3. Market intelligence Map a competitive landscape: pull every company tagged "AI agents" or "vertical SaaS" with their funding and headcount, then segment by stage.

4. Investor mapping For a given portfolio company or sector, surface the active investors. Build investor short-lists for outreach.

5. M&A and acquisition research Track acquisitions in a category over time. Combine with funding data to spot consolidation patterns.

6. Academic and policy research Track founding patterns, funding trends, and regional ecosystem growth using a structured dataset rather than scraping pages by hand.

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How to Use

1. Open the actor on Apify: apify.com/cryptosignals/crunchbase-scraper
2. Click Try for free — no credit card required for small runs.
3. Pick an action:
   • search — find companies by keyword (returns a list)
   • company — fetch a single company's full profile (returns one rich record)
4. Fill in the matching field:
   • For search → set query to your keyword (e.g. "fintech", "AI agents").
   • For company → set query to the Crunchbase permalink (e.g. "stripe") or set url to the full Crunchbase URL.
5. Click Start and download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or pull them programmatically via the Apify API.

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Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
action	string (search | company)	Yes	What to do: search by keyword, or fetch one company's details.
query	string	Yes for search; optional for company	Search keyword (search action) or company permalink, e.g. "stripe" (company action).
url	string	Optional for company	Full Crunchbase URL, e.g. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe. Use this or query.
maxItems	integer (1-100)	Optional	Cap the number of results for a search. Default returns up to 25.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional	Apify proxy settings. Defaults to datacenter proxy; switch to residential if you hit blocks.

Common pitfall: if you pick action: "search" you must provide query. Submitting an empty form (just the default action) will fail validation. Always set query for searches.

Example input — Search

{
  "action": "search",
  "query": "fintech",
  "maxItems": 25,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["DATACENTER"]
  }
}

Example input — Single company

{
  "action": "company",
  "query": "stripe"
}

Or by URL:

{
  "action": "company",
  "url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe"
}

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Output Example

Search action — list of companies

[
  {
    "name": "Stripe",
    "permalink": "stripe",
    "url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe",
    "shortDescription": "Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses.",
    "websiteUrl": "https://stripe.com",
    "foundedOn": "2010",
    "location": "San Francisco, CA",
    "numEmployees": "5001-10000",
    "fundingTotal": "$8.7B",
    "categories": ["FinTech", "Payments", "SaaS"]
  },
  {
    "name": "Plaid",
    "permalink": "plaid-technologies",
    "url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-technologies",
    "shortDescription": "Plaid powers fintech apps with secure access to consumer financial data.",
    "websiteUrl": "https://plaid.com",
    "foundedOn": "2013",
    "location": "San Francisco, CA",
    "numEmployees": "501-1000",
    "fundingTotal": "$734M",
    "categories": ["FinTech", "API"]
  }
]

Company action — single rich record

{
  "name": "Stripe",
  "permalink": "stripe",
  "url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe",
  "shortDescription": "Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses.",
  "description": "Stripe builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size — from new startups to public companies — use Stripe to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their businesses online.",
  "websiteUrl": "https://stripe.com",
  "foundedOn": "2010",
  "location": "San Francisco, CA",
  "numEmployees": "5001-10000",
  "fundingTotal": "$8.7B",
  "fundingRounds": [
    {"type": "Series I", "amount": "$6.5B", "date": "2023-03-15"},
    {"type": "Series H", "amount": "$600M", "date": "2021-03-14"}
  ],
  "investors": ["Sequoia Capital", "Andreessen Horowitz", "Founders Fund", "GV"],
  "founders": ["Patrick Collison", "John Collison"],
  "categories": ["FinTech", "Payments", "SaaS"]
}

Datasets can be exported as JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel from the Apify console, or fetched programmatically via the dataset API.

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Calling the Actor Programmatically

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cryptosignals~crunchbase-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "action": "search",
    "query": "AI agents",
    "maxItems": 25
  }'

Python (apify-client)

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("cryptosignals/crunchbase-scraper").call(run_input={
    "action": "search",
    "query": "AI agents",
    "maxItems": 25,
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["name"], "-", item.get("fundingTotal"))

Node.js (apify-client)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('cryptosignals/crunchbase-scraper').call({
    action: 'company',
    query: 'stripe',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items[0]);

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Pricing

This actor uses Pay-per-event — you only pay for results scraped, not for compute time or failed runs.

• Cost: $0.005 per result (company record)
• Free tier: Apify's free plan includes $5/month of platform credits — enough to pull ~1,000 results to try it out.
• Typical search run: 25 companies → about $0.13.
• Typical company-detail run: 1 rich record → about $0.005.

See full Apify pricing →

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FAQ

Is scraping Crunchbase legal?

Scraping publicly visible data — pages anyone can view without logging in — is generally considered lawful in many jurisdictions. The U.S. Ninth Circuit's hiQ v. LinkedIn decision (2022) affirmed that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This actor only collects data from publicly visible Crunchbase pages — it does not access Crunchbase Pro features, log in, or bypass paywalls. Always consult your own legal counsel for your specific use case and check Crunchbase's terms.

Do I need a Crunchbase or Crunchbase Pro account?

No. This actor works against the public profile pages.

What if I get blocked?

The default proxy is Apify Datacenter, which works for most queries. If you scrape a lot of records and start seeing failures, switch proxyConfiguration.apifyProxyGroups to ["RESIDENTIAL"] for higher success rates (residential proxies cost more per GB).

Can I schedule this actor?

Yes. Use Apify's built-in scheduler to run on a cron — daily, weekly, or any interval. Push results to a webhook, Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, or your own database.

What if Crunchbase changes its layout?

We monitor and update the actor when Crunchbase changes its pages. If you spot a missing field or a broken run, open an issue on the actor page and we'll investigate.

Can I get historical funding data older than what Crunchbase shows?

The actor returns whatever Crunchbase publishes on the profile at the time of the run. For full historical archives, schedule periodic runs and store the results yourself.

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Related Actors

Looking for more company and lead-generation data?

• LinkedIn Jobs Scraper — Job listings from LinkedIn at scale.
• LinkedIn Company Scraper — Public company profiles and employee counts.
• G2 Reviews Scraper — Software reviews, pricing, and competitor mentions.
• Capterra Reviews Scraper — Software category reviews and ratings.

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About Web Data Labs

This actor is maintained by Web Data Labs — we publish a catalog of 100+ production-ready scrapers on the Apify platform covering jobs, e-commerce, social media, software reviews, and company data. Pay-per-result pricing means you only ever pay for data you receive.

Questions or custom data needs? Reach out via the Apify contact form or visit web-data-labs.com.

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New to Apify? Start here

Sign up for Apify through this link to get $5 in free platform credits — enough to try this actor and many others on the Web Data Labs catalog at no cost.