CrunchBase Now Has An API, So Grab Our Data

Today we’re excited to announce a free, open, and easily-accessible API for all data included in CrunchBase, our tech company database. It is available immediately to all developers.

Since we relaunched the property five months ago, we’ve focused on accumulating and structuring the world’s most useful data about technology. And we’ve worked to make this data available in a variety of ways. For example, we’ve aggregated funding rounds and acquisitions, and we’ve built out maps and advanced search. This next step – opening up our data completely so that anyone can use it however they want – is not only logical but central to our mission as well.

The CrunchBase API is read-only and uses JSON for output. There are no developer accounts to sign up for and no throttling of requests. Just point your
browser to a special URL like this one (or curl it from the command-line), and you’ll receive pretty-printed JSON of all the data found on a normal page. The data includes company descriptions, geocoded office locations, acquisitions, executive boards, competitors, and much more.

API requests also include the permalinks (URLs) of other entities on CrunchBase that can be used to navigate across the database. While the API is released in beta, we’re versioning it so that integrations won’t break when we make changes.

We are still finalizing our data policies and terms of use, but we’ll be publishing all content under the Creative Commons Attribution License or something very similar, which means third parties are free to use it with attribution and a link back to CrunchBase. We’ve also made available some CrunchBase images (logos, iPhone icons, etc) for those who want to acknowledge us more visibly.

We’re really excited to see how the API gets used, so please let us know what you come up with.

You can follow CrunchBase on Twitter for updates about the API and other features (or just to give us a shout-out). We’ve also started a CrunchBase Blog where we’ll post regularly. And if you hate unstructured data as much as we do, come join us: we’re looking for a talented Ruby hacker.

Update: We’ve implemented several new features for the API: see the CrunchBase blog post here.