CrunchBase Inc., the online database of the tech startup ecosystem that spun out of TechCrunch Inc. and parent company AOL/Verizon late last year, is debuting a professional version of its service with better search, filtering and notification capabilities than its free offering.

The company is pitching CrunchBase Pro, which is priced at $29 per month on an annual subscription basis, at professionals searching for companies to do business with, venture capital investors and entrepreneurs looking for money.

CrunchBase is best known as a research tool for people looking for insights on budding companies, particularly funding information. Its database includes basic profiles of each company along with background on leadership teams, fund-raising activity, recent news, competitors and customers. Registered members can contribute and edit profiles.

The free service gets more than two million monthly visitors and adds about 10 million annual updates to its base of nearly one million records of companies, investors people and products.  Contributions coming from 200,000 volunteers, as well as venture capital firms, automated news filters and a staff of 60 people, according to Chief Executive Jager McConnell. The company sells custom extracts of its database on a subscription basis and has tripled revenue in the past year on a 10-fold growth in customers, McConnell said.

Crunchbase Pro adds a set of filters and ranking criteria to the basic free service. It also folds in rankings of companies according to the amount of news and social media activity they generate, search activity and recent funding rounds, among other criteria. Users of the Pro edition get a more powerful multi-join query engine as well as the ability to search for trending companies by category to see which are generating the most investor and press interest. Subscribers can also set email alerts about specific companies, products or categories and drill into search results to see the connections between entities.

Such a tool has value to media, investors looking for opportunities and startups who want to find investors who have show interest in businesses like theirs. The Pro service will initially operate on a standalone basis, but McConnell said the company plans to make it possible to integrate its data with popular customer relationship management systems and integrate external information from external data sources through new and existing partnerships.

“For example, you’ll be able to conduct a job search for companies that have a Glassdoor [Inc.] rating of four or better and an opening for a particular job,” listed on a public job site, he said.

McConnell said similar profiling tools for investment professionals can command license fees of up to $100,000 per year. “We’re trying to build something that democratizes these tools,” he said.