Crunchbase is using AI to predict company funding

Crunchbase is using artificial intelligence to predict when startups will raise funding, get acquired or hit the public markets, reports Belle Lin of The Wall Street Journal.

Lin reports, “Like other startups that have been challenged by the emergence of generative AI, Crunchbase needed to pivot. At a leadership meeting convened to discuss its future, McConnell said the team decided it could make predictions using its most valuable asset: the proprietary data generated by the startup’s 80 million users.

“That data isn’t the public information on a company’s profile. It’s all of the data Crunchbase doesn’t expose to its users, such as when company profiles have been edited, who edits them and what they’re editing.

“If a startup’s employee makes edits to a company’s profile and is searching for investor profiles, plus there’s a spike in investor interest in that startup’s profile, those are the kinds of signals Crunchbase’s AI uses to indicate the startup is about to raise funding, McConnell said.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.