Crunchbase exports search results and lists to CSV, but the file is a snapshot, not a live column. In 2022 I exported one for 340 accounts already sitting in my CRM. Matching it back on company name got me 190 hits. Six weeks later, two of those rows were already wrong.
Disclosure up front: CUFinder is the product I work on, so it shows up later in this guide. Read that part with that in mind.
Let’s get into it.
📌 TL;DR: A Crunchbase CSV export hands you the rows your search returned, frozen at download time. Three limits: it goes stale immediately, the bigger exports are access-gated, and matching it back to your own accounts on company name breaks. Five routes: keep Crunchbase for discovery, use the API or bulk export, work public sources, skip scraping, or enrich the list you already own.
What Does a Crunchbase CSV Export Actually Give You?
A file of the companies your search returned, frozen at the moment you clicked export. That’s it. No live connection, no updates, no ping when one of them raises next month.
And if you want company funding data at scale, the export is the obvious first stop. It comes in two levels.
The Export Inside the Product
Run a search or open a saved list, then export the results to CSV. For a one-off pull, it’s genuinely handy.
Here’s the honest caveat. That export is gated by your plan and capped per export, and the specifics change over time. So check Crunchbase’s current support docs before you plan around a number. I’m not quoting one, because it would be stale by the time you read this.
The Developer-Side Exports
Two bulk options exist as well. And I’ll only describe what Crunchbase’s own developer documentation says.
The Crunchbase Basic Export ships one file for Organizations and one for People. It arrives as a tar.gz, requested with an API key from your Crunchbase account.
The legacy CSV export is the big one. Crunchbase’s docs mark it as “considered Legacy as of July 2024,” and it still updates each morning. It comes as a compressed TAR holding 17 CSV files, covering organizations, people, funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs, events and mapping tables.
A few more details from that same page:
- Access. Enterprise or Applications Access is required to download the legacy CSV files.
- Big files. A split version exists in 500k-row chunks, for tools that can’t cope with files over 1M rows.
- New fields. Those only get added to the newer CSV export, not the legacy one.
- Sampling. A public sample carries 50 records from each file.
People call this a crunchbase data dump, and that’s roughly what it is. The database as flat files.
One line from the license matters more than all of it: the data can’t be redistributed to third parties. So the file is for your team. Not for resale.
Okay. You have the file. Why does it stop helping so fast?
Why Does the Export Stop Being Useful?
Because a CSV is a snapshot, and your list keeps moving after you download it. Three things break, usually in this order.
1. It Goes Stale Immediately
Companies raise money every week. So the day you export is the last day that file is fully correct.
That slow rot has a name: data decay. And funding decays faster than almost any other field.
A funding round that closed last month is one of the strongest buying signals in B2B. Fresh money means new budget and new hires. A six-month-old CSV hides it.
🔍 Did You Know? Crunchbase's own developer docs mark the legacy CSV export as "considered Legacy as of July 2024," and ship a split version in 500k-row chunks for tools that can't open files past a million rows.
2. The Join Key Breaks
This is the part nobody writes about, and it’s the real reason exports disappoint.
You export a list of companies. Then you match it back to the accounts you already have, on company name. And your spreadsheet says no.
Because “Meridian Labs,” “Meridian Labs, Inc.” and “meridian labs” are three different strings. A VLOOKUP compares characters, not companies. So it fails quietly.
That’s my 2022 morning in one sentence. 340 accounts, one export, 190 name matches, and a long afternoon of cleanup for the rest. The fix is boring and it works: join on domain, not on name.
📌 Example: My file, 2022. 340 accounts, one export, 190 name matches, and two rows already wrong six weeks later. That wasn't a data problem. That was a join-key problem.
3. It Answers the Wrong Question
Two different jobs get confused constantly. Discovery asks “which companies exist?” Enrichment asks “what’s true about the companies I already have?”
And Crunchbase is excellent at the first one. Genuinely. If you don’t yet know which Series B fintechs exist in Berlin, that browsable funding search is what you’re paying for.
But I wasn’t discovering anything. My 340 companies were already mine, already in the CRM. I needed ONE column added, and I’d downloaded a whole database instead.
That’s the mistake worth avoiding. Five honest routes exist, and only one fits any given job.
What Are Your Alternatives to the Crunchbase Export?
Five routes: the in-product export, the API, public sources, scraping, or enriching a list you own. Here’s the trade-off on each.
Route 1: Stay With Crunchbase
Keep it if you need to discover companies by funding stage, sector and date. Nothing in a spreadsheet replaces a browsable funding search.
So before you shop for a crunchbase alternative, ask what job you’re hiring it for. If the answer is “find me companies I’ve never heard of,” the database earns its money.
And when the job is narrower (ten good accounts, and you want more like them), you can find similar companies from a seed list instead. And when the “more like them” you need is people rather than companies, lookalike prospecting from a seed of known buyers is the person-level equivalent.
Route 2: The Official API or Bulk Export
Most control, cleanest license position. You get the data at the source, on your own schedule, with permission.
The costs are real, though. You need the right access tier, per Crunchbase’s documentation. And somebody has to maintain the pipeline afterwards.
Route 3: Public and Open Sources
Company registries, regulatory filings, press releases, the companies’ own news pages. All free, all public, all slow.
Type “crunchbase alternative free” or “crunchbase export csv free” into Google and you’ll get a lot of promises. Underneath them sits one unglamorous truth: the sources are public, and reading them is work.
So that’s the real answer to how to get crunchbase data for free. Slowly, by hand, from the source. Fine for a 30-company shortlist. A full-time job at 3,000.
Route 4: Scraping
Fast to start. Also the route I won’t recommend, and I’m not linking you to one.
Scraping a site like this typically breaks its terms of service. And the license restricts redistribution either way, so even a clean scrape leaves you holding data you can’t pass along.
The official API exists for exactly this reason. Use that.
Route 5: Enrich the List You Already Have
If your companies already sit in a sheet, you don’t need an export at all. You need columns added to your rows.
That’s a different tool category, and it’s the one most people actually wanted. When your list arrives as a file rather than a live sheet, same idea with an upload step: that’s CSV enrichment. And if you want a crunchbase export to excel workflow, the round-trip lives in the data enrichment in Excel guide.
💡 Pro Tip: Join on domain, never on company name. "Meridian Labs" and "Meridian Labs, Inc." are two different companies to a spreadsheet, and cleanup formulas won't fix that reliably.
One question sorts all five routes: do you need to FIND companies, or FILL IN companies? Answer that honestly and the route picks itself.
For my 340 accounts, it was fill in. So here’s exactly how I do that now.
How Do You Get Funding Data Into Google Sheets Without an Export?
Run a funding enrichment service on your company column and let it write the rounds. No download, no import.
One more disclosure, because this is where our own tool shows up. CUFinder is the product I work on, so read this section with that in mind, and test it against anything else on your own 20 rows.
The whole loop is five steps:
- Install the add-on. Grab the CUFinder add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace. New to add-ons? Google’s help page explains how they install and where they show up.
- Copy your API key. Open your CUFinder dashboard and copy the API key from there.
- Enter the key in the add-on. Paste it once, and you’re connected.
- Pick the service. Open the add-on from the Google Sheets menu. It opens as a right panel listing all the enrichment services. Choose Enrich Company with Fundraising Data, which takes a company name or domain and returns round type, amount raised and investors. Want the rest of the profile too? That’s Company Enrichment.
- Map columns, set the range, run. Set the input column (your domains, ideally, not names), the output column where the rounds should land, and the row range (rows 2-341 for my account list). Then run it.
Now notice what’s missing: the matching step. The run reads YOUR rows, in your order, so there’s no CSV to download and no VLOOKUP to write. No 190-out-of-340, either.
That’s the actual difference. The crunchbase to google sheets workflow most people picture goes export → download → import → match. This one deletes all four.
Industry, headcount and HQ location are a separate ask; that’s firmographic data, from the company-profile side. There’s a fuller walkthrough of company enrichment in Google Sheets, plus a deeper funding column walkthrough for this folder. New to the field? Start with what company funding data includes.
Now the limits, straight from me rather than from a disappointing first run:
- We’re not a discovery database. You can’t browse “all Series B fintechs in Berlin” here. If that’s the job, keep the database.
- Unmatched rows stay empty. We’d rather leave a blank cell than write a guess you’d act on.
- Coverage is strongest for public rounds. Quiet and small private raises are thinner everywhere, not just with us.
- Credits are consumed. Every run costs something, so a mis-mapped column costs real money.
So test 20 rows before you run 2,000. True of us, true of everyone else.
A Worked Example: 5 Rows, Before and After
Here’s what it looks like on a real sheet. Made-up companies, real workflow.
Column A holds names, column B holds domains, and columns C and D sit empty:
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Company | Domain | Last Round | Amount Raised |
| 2 | Northwind Analytics | northwindanalytics.com | ||
| 3 | Kestrel Bio | kestrelbio.com | ||
| 4 | Tallgrass Logistics | tallgrasslogistics.com | ||
| 5 | Ironvine Software | ironvine.io | ||
| 6 | Vela Payments | velapayments.com |
Then I picked Enrich Company with Fundraising Data, set the input to column B, the output to columns C and D, and the range to rows 2-6. One run later:
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Company | Domain | Last Round | Amount Raised |
| 2 | Northwind Analytics | northwindanalytics.com | Series B | $32M |
| 3 | Kestrel Bio | kestrelbio.com | Series A | $14M |
| 4 | Tallgrass Logistics | tallgrasslogistics.com | Seed | $4.5M |
| 5 | Ironvine Software | ironvine.io | ||
| 6 | Vela Payments | velapayments.com | Series C | $60M |
Look at row 5. Ironvine Software is bootstrapped, so there’s no round to report and both cells stay empty. That’s the correct answer, not a gap.
Because an unfunded company has no round, and an honest tool says so. An invented “Series A” there would be worse than a blank.
→ your accounts → their domains → a funding column → no export, no matching step.
And next quarter? Re-run the same range, and the column updates in place. New rounds land in cells that already exist, beside your own notes and owners. Company funding data moves slowly, so quarterly is plenty. A downloaded CSV can never update itself.
Revenue is usually the next column people want beside funding, and it works the same way: finding company revenue in bulk has its own guide.
What Should You Check Before You Replace a Crunchbase Export?
Six checks: coverage on your rows, the join key, discovery versus enrichment, license, price, and refresh cadence.
Run through them before the demo call, not during it:
- Test coverage on YOUR 20 rows. Not the vendor’s sample list. Every source has gaps, ours included, and your industry and region decide where they land.
- Join on domain, never on company name. If a tool only accepts names, assume the 340-to-190 problem follows you into it.
- Ask whether you need discovery or enrichment. If the job is finding companies you’ve never heard of, keep the database.
- Check the license on anything you’ll share. Most company data carries redistribution limits. Fine for your team; not fine in a deck you send outside it.
- Price it per row, not per subscription. Divide the annual figure by the rows you’ll genuinely enrich. That’s the number to compare.
- Decide your refresh cadence up front. Quarterly is usually enough for funding, and that rhythm turns a one-off pull into real B2B data enrichment.
FAQ: Crunchbase Exports and Alternatives
How do I export a CSV from Crunchbase?
From a saved search or a list inside the product, using the export option there. What you can pull depends on your plan, and those caps change, so check Crunchbase’s current support docs first. Developers use the Basic Export or the legacy bulk export.
Is there a free alternative to Crunchbase?
Partly. Company registries, regulatory filings and company press pages are free, public and slow. Most enrichment tools, ours included, hand you starter credits to test with. But nothing at bulk scale stays free; those routes charge you in time.
What is Crunchbase used for?
Discovering companies and tracking their funding: who raised, how much, from whom, and when. It’s a discovery database, and it’s good at that job. Investors, sales teams and researchers use it to surface companies they don’t already know.
What is better, PitchBook or Crunchbase?
Neither, universally. It depends on whether you want private-market depth or broad company discovery. One category leans toward detailed investment research. The other leans toward wide company coverage. Both are discovery tools, and neither keeps YOUR account list current.
What is the difference between Crunchbase and Apollo?
One is a company-and-funding database; the other is a sales-contact platform. Different jobs entirely. You’d use the first to learn which companies raised money recently, and the second to reach people who work there. Plenty of teams run both.
Can I scrape Crunchbase?
Technically possible, but it typically breaks the site’s terms of service, so I don’t recommend it. The data license also restricts redistribution, which leaves your rights murky even when it works. Use the official API, or enrich your own list.
How do I get Crunchbase data into Google Sheets?
Export a CSV and import it, or skip the export and enrich the rows already in your sheet. Those are the two crunchbase to google sheets routes in practice. The import gives you a snapshot; the enrichment run writes columns beside your rows, no matching step.
Stop Exporting, Start Enriching
That 2022 file taught me something I still repeat to new hires. I never needed a database of companies. I needed one column added to a list I already owned.
So my favorite crunchbase alternatives these days aren’t databases at all. They’re the columns I add to my own 340 rows, quarterly, without a single download.
And if discovery genuinely is your job, go keep paying for the database. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the right tool.
Funding is just one column, too. The whole data enrichment in Google Sheets hub covers what to add next. Tell me in the comments: how many rows are you trying to match right now?
Bad
Okay
Good
Amazing
