Crunchbase Grows Its ARR | Funding For NFT Infrastructure | New Funds For Under 30 Alums

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by my 2021 Spotify Wrapped playlist which has everything from Paul Simon to Cardi B and is what I listened to while putting this all together. I hope your playlist was as fun and cringey as mine. This edition takes a closer look at Crunchbase’s sales prospecting software which has flown under the radar despite creating meaningful ARR, looks at a startup that has created a data layer for NFTs, dives into how the pandemic has made healthtech companies ripe for retail investor appetite and Kenrick has notes on a new fund from some Under 30 alums. Let’s get to it!

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Crunchbase has been building and scaling a proprietary sales software — largely in the background — that uses its database to make it easier for B2B companies to find potential customers. The more companies find success with the software, the better it becomes at recommending leads. The concept came from CEO Jager McConnell who has been thinking it through for more than a decade, and had previously tried to build it while on sabbatical from Salesforce. Instead of building the database from scratch, Crunchbase offered the perfect launch point. When he took the helm in 2015, he imagined it could become a Spotify or a LinkedIn for companies to connect and find each other. Now his creation has tens of thousands of paying customers and is raking in double-digit millions of ARR. A far cry from what the company looked like six years ago. 

The history: When McConnell took over as CEO in 2015, the platform felt forgotten. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington launched the startup database in 2007 as part of  the tech news website as a way to track the companies it covered, but it wasn't anyone's main focus. “It was always a side project, the data was all community-driven, it was out of date,” McConnell tells Midas Touch. Crunchbase spunout from TechCrunch and its latest owners, AOL/Verizon, and McConnell was on board. He had about a year and a half of runway to hire a full team to build and start selling the software, funded by an $8.5 million Series A round led by Midas lister Santi Subotovsky of Emergence Capital. So far, it’s paid off...

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