--- title: "Datahyena vs. Crunchbase: a funding signals API, measured | Datahyena" url: https://datahyena.com/compare/datahyena-vs-crunchbase/ description: "Crunchbase is a company database you look things up in. Datahyena is an event feed that tells you a round happened. 71% of rounds reach our API within an hour of publication, median 36 minutes. An honest comparison, with the numbers behind it." --- [Datahyena vs. Crunchbase](https://datahyena.com/compare) # One is a database you query, the other tells you something happened. Crunchbase answers "what do we know about this company?". Datahyena answers "which companies just raised?" — as a feed, in minutes rather than days, with the numbers to show it. [Get your API key →](https://app.datahyena.com/register) [See the signals](https://datahyena.com/signals/funding) In short Both of us resolve companies, funding rounds and investors, and both of us will give you a company's history through an API. The real split is arrival: Crunchbase is a database you go and ask, Datahyena is a feed that tells you. We hold a full per-company timeline — rounds, acquisitions and executive moves against a 49,000-investor graph — but our record thins out before 2020, and we carry no valuations or cap table. Most teams choosing between us are really choosing between lookup and detection, and plenty run both. ## Measured, not asserted. Recomputed weekly from the live corpus. Every figure below is reproducible from your own API responses. 73% of rounds reach the API within an hour of publication Measured on 2,000+ served rounds from the last 90 days, from the article's publish timestamp to the moment our pipeline held the event. 35 minutes median time from publication to API Half arrive faster. 84% are through inside two hours. 57% of rounds are reported by exactly one publication Over the last 12 months. It is why watching two or three well-known outlets misses most of the market, and why breadth of source coverage decides recall. ~790 new rounds added a month Keyed on when the round was announced, not when we ingested it. As of August 31, 2026 ## Side by side. Datahyena Crunchbase Primary shape Event stream: funding, acquisitions, exec moves Company database with an API on top How you find out Webhook fires, or you poll a cursor You query for it Time to first byte Median 36 minutes from publication Not published as a metric Entity resolution Company, investor and person resolved across outlets, deduplicated Canonical profiles, curated and community-edited Per-company history Full timeline: funding, acquisitions and exec moves on one endpoint Funding history and profile, no exec moves Investor graph 49,000+ investors, 190,000+ investor-to-round links Investor profiles and portfolios Funding record 2020 forward, 4,000-7,000 rounds a year Starts earlier Valuations / cap table Not collected Yes Delivery REST, webhooks, MCP, S3 or SFTP files REST API, CSV export, web app Pricing shape Self-serve credits from $0, enterprise licence for bulk Seat-based tiers, enterprise API contract ## Which one fits you. ### Choose Datahyena when - You want to be told a round happened, not to go and check. Webhooks fire on new and updated events; nothing has to poll. - Your workflow is time-boxed. A round you learn about three weeks late is a round your competitor already acted on. - You need the long tail. Most rounds never reach a major outlet, so coverage depth decides how many you see at all. - You want the raw event, not a UI: JSON, cursors, an MCP server, and S3 or SFTP delivery if you would rather receive files. ### When Crunchbase is the better choice - You need funding history from before 2020, which is where our record starts and theirs does not. - You need valuations, cap tables or ownership. We do not collect them, and valuation appears only where an article states it. - You want a product a non-technical team can browse and search. We have a query playground, not a company directory to click through. - You are buying on brand for a procurement process that has heard of one of us. ## What makes Datahyena different. ### Detection is a measurable claim, so we measure it Anyone can write "real-time". The number that matters is the gap between an article going live and the event reaching your code, across every round rather than a flattering one. We publish ours, recomputed weekly from the live corpus, and you can reproduce it from your own API responses. If it slips, the page slips with it. ### The market is mostly long tail Six in ten rounds we track appear in a single publication, and never reach the outlets most teams watch. That is the whole argument for reading everything rather than a shortlist: recall is a function of source breadth, and a feed that only mirrors the consensus is a feed you could have built from an RSS reader. ### One timeline per company, not just a feed Every event resolves onto a canonical company, so a single call returns that company's whole history: rounds, acquisitions and executive moves together, with the investors on each round. Signals are what we detect; the graph they land on is what makes them worth querying later. ## Where Crunchbase wins. A comparison with no losses is an advert. These are the cases where we would tell you to buy the other thing. ### Our funding record starts in 2020 From 2020 forward it is dense, between four and seven thousand rounds a year. Before that it thins out quickly. If you need to know what a company raised in 2016, that is a question for Crunchbase. ### No valuations, cap tables or ownership We do not store a valuation field at all. Where an article states a valuation it survives in the event text, but there is nothing structured to filter or sort on, and no ownership or cap-table data of any kind. This is a deliberate scope choice rather than a backlog item. ### No browsing UI There is a dashboard with a query playground, so you can run a real request and see real results without writing code. What there is not is a directory to search and click through company by company. If someone on your team works that way, that is a genuine gap. ### Coverage is not complete, and we will not pretend otherwise Roughly one round in ten has no country attached, usually because neither the announcement nor the company's own site states one. We would rather show you the gap than fill it with a guess. ## Common questions Datahyena and Crunchbase, answered. Is Datahyena a Crunchbase replacement? Depends what you use it for. If you use Crunchbase to watch for funding, we replace that outright and arrive faster. If you use it to research a company's full history, we cover more than people expect — a timeline endpoint returns every funding round, acquisition and executive move we hold for a company, against a graph of 49,000+ investors — but our record thins out before 2020 and we carry no valuations or cap table. Many teams run both. How do you measure the detection figures? From the article's publish timestamp to the moment our pipeline first held the event, across every served round announced in the last 90 days. We deliberately do not measure from the announcement date: most outlets report that as a bare day with no clock time, so measuring from it reports hours since midnight rather than how fast anything moved. Articles that carry only a date, and rounds recovered from historical archives, are excluded for the same reason. Recomputed weekly, floored rather than rounded up. Can I use both? That is the common setup. Datahyena fires the webhook when a round lands; you enrich against Crunchbase or your own CRM once you know which company to look at. The feed decides what deserves attention, the database answers what you then want to know. What happens when a round is reported differently by two outlets? They consolidate into one event rather than two. Amount, stage and date are reconciled across every source that reported it, and the event carries how many independent publications it was seen in, so you can weight a four-source round differently from a single-source one. Is the pricing comparable? Not really, because the shapes differ. Crunchbase sells seats and an enterprise API contract; we sell credits, starting free, with an enterprise licence when you want the bulk corpus by S3 or SFTP. For a single workflow consuming an event feed, we are normally the cheaper option; for a whole team browsing companies, we are not the right purchase at any price. Can I get a company's full history, or only new events? Both. The timeline endpoint returns everything we hold for one company — funding rounds, acquisitions and executive moves — in one call, alongside firmographics: founded year, size band, industry and sub-tags, business model, verticals and social handles. The event feed is how you find out something happened; the timeline is how you catch up on everything that already did. Exec moves in particular are on the timeline and are not something a funding database usually carries. ## Start pulling signals in minutes. Create a key, claim your 50 free credits, and make your first request today. No sales call, no credit card. [Get your API key →](https://app.datahyena.com/register) [Read the docs](https://datahyena.com/docs) 50 free credits · no credit card