Our Investment in Crunchbase

Today, we are excited to welcome Crunchbase to the OMERS Ventures family, having led their $30M Series C financing. Based in San Francisco, Crunchbase has coupled the largest database of private company data with best in class tools to help professionals prospect for opportunities within the private company universe.

Over the past several years, we have seen the number of private companies increase, while the number of public companies decline. In fact, there are about half as many public companies today (~4,400) as there were in 1996 (~8,000). With companies staying private longer and 200,000 new companies being created each year in the US alone, this presents an even greater desire to track, decode and learn more about private companies for commercial or professional purposes.

Businesses want an end-to-end solution to prospect private companies, but they lack the ability to do so with so many disparate sources, databases and systems. This is where Crunchbase comes in — creating a global destination with best-in-class profiles, tools, integrations, automation, and personalized experiences.

Not only is Crunchbase well-positioned to be the source of truth or master record of startups, the magic happens when the data is combined with proprietary insights to provide a personalized recommendation engine. To own the data is one thing, but to transform it and integrate it into your workflow enables Crunchbase to become the system of record for you or your team’s own specific use case. It does not matter if you’re a sales team, a market researcher or a job seeker, the applications are boundless.

We are also extremely excited as Crunchbase’s model and platform fits an investment theme we are interested in: collaboration and enrichment for the modern workplace. The workplace is changing how employees find work, where they work, how they work, and what they work on. Collaboration and improving the efficiency of our work is at the core of how the modern workplace is evolving. Stay tuned for more to come on this area of investment for OMERS Ventures.

Finally, we are excited to work alongside CEO Jager McConnell, the talented team, and esteemed set of investors already involved with Crunchbase. We cannot be more excited to be investors, partners, and champions in the next step of their journey.

Mark Goad, Eugene Lee, Michael Yang and the OMERS Ventures team