Crunchbase Scraper - Companies, Funding & Investors

Pull clean, structured company profiles from Crunchbase by company name, keyword, or exact organization slug — no login, no Crunchbase API key, no paid subscription. For every matching organization you get the company name, description, total funding raised, the last/largest funding round, number of investors, headquarters location, founded year, and website, ready to drop into your CRM, lead list, investment tracker, or AI agent.

This actor is built for the real world: Crunchbase sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge. It runs a real, stealth-hardened Chromium browser (Crawlee PlaywrightCrawler + puppeteer-extra stealth) on a residential IP, lets the browser execute Cloudflare's JS challenge to mint a cf_clearance token, then operates entirely inside that cleared browser context: it calls Crunchbase's own native search (autocomplete) endpoint to resolve your query into organizations, and navigates each company's profile page to read the embedded data. No third-party search engines, no Crunchbase API key, no Enterprise contract.

Heads-up on access (read before running): Crunchbase applies a Cloudflare managed challenge to its search endpoint and profile pages — one of the toughest anti-bot walls in production. A real browser on residential clears it far more reliably than plain HTTP, but on a hot IP pool Cloudflare can still refuse to issue cf_clearance. When that happens the run does not crash, does not spin, and charges nothing: it rotates a few residential sessions, then exits cleanly with cloudflare_challenge_blocked / unblocker_required flags in the summary. If your account hits persistent blocks, point proxyConfiguration at a true unblocker tier (a Bright Data Web Unlocker endpoint, or Apify's Anti-Cloudflare / Unblocker proxy group).

What you can do with it

• Build investor & funding lists — see how much each company raised, over how many rounds, and the size and date of their largest round.
• Enrich a list of company names with descriptions, websites, locations and founded years.
• Feed an AI agent / MCP client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, any MCP-compatible tool) a company name and get a structured funding profile back.
• Track competitors, portfolio companies, or acquisition targets.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
query	string	one of	Company name or keyword to search Crunchbase for, e.g. openai, stripe, fintech payments. Each matching organization becomes one record.
organizationSlug	string	one of	Exact Crunchbase slug from crunchbase.com/organization/<slug>, e.g. openai, databricks. When set, scrapes that one company directly and ignores query.
maxResults	integer	no	Max companies to return. Default 25, min 1, max 1000.
proxyConfiguration	object	recommended	Proxy settings. Residential US with session rotation is required — a real browser on residential is what clears Cloudflare's challenge. Defaults to Apify Residential, US.

Example input

{
  "query": "openai",
  "maxResults": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"], "apifyProxyCountry": "US" }
}

To scrape one exact company:

{ "organizationSlug": "stripe", "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"], "apifyProxyCountry": "US" } }

Output

One dataset item per company, plus a final summary record. Sample:

{
  "name": "OpenAI",
  "slug": "openai",
  "description": "OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence safely and beneficially.",
  "website": "https://openai.com",
  "founded": "2015",
  "location": "San Francisco, California, United States",
  "funding_total_usd": "$180B",
  "num_funding_rounds": 15,
  "last_round": { "type": "Series G round", "amount": "$122B", "date": "Feb 2026" },
  "num_investors": 32,
  "url": "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/openai",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-16T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Every record carries a scraped_at ISO-8601 timestamp. Fields that could not be resolved for a given company are omitted rather than returned empty. The funding fields (funding_total_usd, num_funding_rounds, last_round) come from cached Crunchbase funding captions; website, founded, location and num_investors are best-effort from the live profile and depend on the residential IP clearing Cloudflare on that request.

Pricing

This actor is Pay-Per-Event: you are charged $0.004 per company delivered.

• The first 25 companies are free for each Apify account (lifetime), so you can evaluate the actor before paying anything.
• Empty searches, failed lookups, and the final summary record are never charged.
• You also pay Apify's standard platform usage (compute + residential proxy) as normal.

How it works (transparency)

1. Browser warm-up — the actor opens a real stealth-patched Chromium tab (Crawlee fingerprints + puppeteer-extra stealth: no navigator.webdriver, realistic UA/viewport/locale, automation flags off) on a residential exit and navigates crunchbase.com/. It waits for Cloudflare's JS challenge to resolve and confirms the cf_clearance cookie was issued. Crawlee's blockedStatusCodes is emptied so the 403 challenge page reaches the handler instead of retiring the session early.
2. Discovery — from inside the cleared browser context, a fetch() hits Crunchbase's own autocomplete API (/v4/data/autocompletes?...&collection_ids=organization.organizations), the same endpoint the site's search box calls, carrying cf_clearance and the real fingerprint. Each result yields the org name, canonical slug, and short description.
3. Profile — for each slug, the browser navigates crunchbase.com/organization/<slug> and the embedded Apollo cache (apollo.state JSON island) is mined from the rendered DOM for website, founded year, location, funding total, last round type and investor count, with og/meta fallbacks.

Results are deduped by organization slug. If Cloudflare's challenge never clears (no cf_clearance after several residential rotations), the run never crashes, never charges, and reports cloudflare_challenge_blocked / unblocker_required plus the last cf-mitigated header value in the summary record.

FAQ

Do I need a Crunchbase account or API key? No. Discovery uses Crunchbase's own public autocomplete endpoint and the public profile page.

Why residential proxies (and why might I still need an unblocker)? Crunchbase is behind a Cloudflare managed challenge. A real browser on residential mints the cf_clearance token the challenge demands far more reliably than plain HTTP. Datacenter proxies are always blocked. If your account still hits persistent challenges (hot IP pool), point proxyConfiguration at a true unblocker tier (Bright Data Web Unlocker, or Apify's Anti-Cloudflare / Unblocker proxy group).

Why are some fields missing on some companies? website, location, founded, funding and num_investors are mined from the live Crunchbase profile page. The browser reads it after the challenge clears; if a particular page does not fully render those fields, the record still ships the discovery fields (name, slug, description).

Can I scrape a specific company directly? Yes — pass organizationSlug with the exact slug from the company's Crunchbase URL.

Is this an official Crunchbase product? No. This is an independent scraper for publicly available data. Respect Crunchbase's terms and applicable law in your jurisdiction.

MCP

Works in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP-compatible AI agent. Expose it as a tool and ask for a company by name to get a structured funding profile back.