Two and a half years after last raising capital, market intelligence startup Crunchbase Inc. today announced that it has closed a $30 million funding round led by Omers Ventures.

Omers Ventures is the eponymous startup investment arm of one of Canada’s biggest pension funds. Other participants in the Series C round included Emergence Capital Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Cowboy Ventures and Verizon Communications Inc., which has a long relationship with Crunchbase. The startup got its official start in 2015 after spinning out from Verizon’s AOL division.

The Crunchbase service was born a few years before the spinout as a company database run by the prominent technology blog TechCrunch. It featured profiles of startups with information about their funding rounds, executives, investors and other key details. Crunchbase has since evolved into a full-fledged market intelligence service that counts some 55 million users worldwide.

The startup aggregates data about companies in a range of segments and provides search filters for surfacing specific firms. A venture capitalist, for instance, could use Crunchbase to look up emerging software-as-a-service providers that haven’t raised funding in the past year. Enterprise salespeople, the startup’s main target audience, employ the service as a prospecting tool.

A sizable portion of the 55 million people who use Crunchbase are free users. But the startup boasts a growing list of paying customers that includes major brands such as Nvidia Corp., Honda Motor Corp. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Crunchbase also has 4,000 data and syndication deals with organizations that incorporate its company profiles into their services.

“We are creating a global destination with best-in-class private company profiles, tools, and community,” Crunchbase Chief Executive Officer Jager McConnell said in a statement. “We will power the future of B2B deal making, starting with a better way to prospect for private company opportunities.”

To pursue that goal, Crunchbase will double its headcount over the next year and work to enhance data acquisition channels. The startup also plans to roll out a number of platform updates including a new design for company profiles that will make key information easier to find.

Crunchbase has raised more than $55 million in outside funding so far.

Photo: Pixabay