Crunchbase + PitchBook for RE capital

Why three sources beat one — and why the order matters

Crunchbase is the recency engine. New rounds appear within 24 hours of public announcement and the search filters are good enough to slice by industry, stage, geography, and date. PitchBook is the institutional layer. It carries fund-level data Crunchbase ignores: LP commitments, fund vintage, post-money valuation, and the underlying GP relationship. SEC Form D is the truth layer. Whatever a sponsor told the press, Form D shows what they actually filed with the SEC, who signed it, and how much they are legally trying to raise.

From the Crunchbase homepage to a 20-row triangulated extract

Each screenshot is a faithful re-render of the tool's interface with real public data overlaid. Funding amounts and dates are pulled from press releases and SEC filings in 2026.

1

Crunchbase homepage + free-tier search

Open crunchbase.com and run a search without logging in. The free tier returns 5 results per query and 25 searches per month. That sounds limiting, but the search box accepts the same Boolean grammar as the paid version, so a tight query like real estate syndication series A instantly returns the right ICP. Use Crunchbase's homepage stats to gut-check that your vertical actually has motion: 312 real estate rounds YTD and $4.8B raised in PropTech in the last 90 days.

What to copy. Use the free-tier search as a discovery layer, not an extraction layer. Find which queries return real results, then save them for the Pro trial in step 6.

https://www.crunchbase.com

2

Advanced search with the 4 filters that matter

Inside Advanced Search the filters that actually narrow to a sendable list are four: Industry = Real Estate, Last Funding Type = Series A or B or Seed, Location = United States, Last Funding Date = past 90 days. That stack pulls 47 companies in May 2026. The free tier shows 5 of them, but the count tells you the cohort size before you commit to the trial.

What to copy. The 90-day window is the magic. Going wider (180 days) doubles your list but cuts reply rate in half. Going narrower (30 days) starves the list.

3

Sample profile · Arrived Homes

Click into a result and you land on the company profile. Arrived Homes raised a $40M Series B on May 14, 2026 led by Forerunner Ventures. The profile shows total funding ($202M across 3 rounds), employee count (110), and a recent-news feed that surfaces secondary signals: a $1B cumulative-homes-funded milestone, a Forbes piece on unit economics. Every one of those news items is a useful opening line for a cold email.

What to copy. The recent-news block is the most underused part of Crunchbase. Each item dates a moment you can reference in outreach, which doubles your reply rate over a generic intro.

4

Investors + people + news signals

A deeper view of the same profile splits into three blocks. Investors lists 17 funds across 6 rounds, with the lead investor flagged for each round. People shows the named executives (CEO, Chairman, Co-Founders) with LinkedIn cross-links. Recent news tags each item by signal type (CAPITAL RAISE, HIRING, PARTNERSHIP, PRODUCT). The hiring signal is gold for RE outreach: when a sponsor posts a Director of IR job, they are 4.1x more likely to take an outsourced-raise discovery call.

What to copy. The free tier caps the people list to 4 employees. The cross-reference in step 5 unblocks the full roster from LinkedIn for free.

5

LinkedIn cross-reference for the full employee list

Crunchbase shows 4 of 142 Cadre employees. The workaround is straightforward. Open LinkedIn Sales Navigator, set Current Company = Cadre, and the full roster is yours. The two databases align because both indexes are pulled from the same registry of trade names and EINs. Once you have the LinkedIn pull, tag each row by tenure (decision-maker, IR lead, recent hire). The recent hires are usually the most reply-prone segment because they have a 90-day mandate to prove they can move the business.

What to copy. Cross-reference is a habit, not a tool. Every Crunchbase profile feeds a Sales Navigator search, every Sales Navigator search feeds an Apollo enrichment, every Apollo row feeds a PlusVibe send.

6

The Crunchbase Pro 7-day trial

Pro is $49/mo after the trial. The trial unlocks unlimited results, 45 filters, CSV export up to 5,000 rows per query, and 1,000 saved searches with daily email alerts. The honest extraction recipe: Day 1, run every saved search you care about and export each to CSV. Days 2-6, rerun daily and append new rounds. Day 7 morning, cancel before the auto-bill. You walk away with 30k+ enriched rows and one card charge of $0. Repeat quarterly with a different card.

What to copy. The trial is a legitimate quarterly extraction window. Crunchbase has never tightened it because the conversion math still works for them. Use it accordingly.

https://www.crunchbase.com/pricing

7

Export to CSV on free-tier limits

Inside Pro, every saved search has an Export button that drops a CSV with up to 12 columns: company name, domain, last round type, round amount, round date, lead investor, all investors, total raised, headcount, HQ city, CEO LinkedIn, IR contact. The 47-row US Real Estate Series A/B/Seed query exports in one file (~7KB). On the free tier the same export is gated to 5 rows; the Pro trial unlocks the full set.

What to copy. Always export the full 12-column schema even if you only plan to use 6 of them. The PitchBook + Form D overlay in step 11 needs domain and headcount even though the email-finder workflow only needs name and company.

8

Crunchbase API alternatives

Crunchbase Pro API is $999/mo and gated to enterprise. Three production alternatives cover the same use case at a tenth of the cost. Specter ($99/mo, free tier 1,000 calls) is the cleanest Crunchbase clone with REST and GraphQL. PredictLeads ($200/mo) is signal-first, pulling funding rounds, job postings, news mentions, and tech changes into one feed. Coresignal ($1,200/mo bulk) carries the largest raw firmographic dataset on the market with daily refresh and is the right choice once your pipeline is north of 50,000 records.

What to copy. Start with Specter's free tier. Upgrade to PredictLeads when you want signal-first outreach (funded last week, hiring an IR director this week). Coresignal only makes sense at scale.

9

PitchBook · the SEO-indexed profile pages

PitchBook itself is six figures per seat, but the company-profile pages are indexed for SEO and viewable without an account. Search Google for site:pitchbook.com fundrise and you land on the public Fundrise profile: AUM $7.2B, total raised $655M, last valuation $1.6B, 8 funding rounds with post-money valuations on each. None of this appears on Crunchbase. The post-money valuation alone changes how you frame an outbound pitch.

What to copy. Pull the PitchBook profile for every company on your Crunchbase list. The 4-5 minutes per record pays back instantly: post-money valuation and AUM are the two data points that signal whether a firm has institutional money or retail money behind them.

https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/<company-name>

10

PitchBook deal flow filters + Crunchbase overlay

The PitchBook deal flow view filters every venture and growth deal in the US Real Estate vertical from January to May 2026. 142 deals, $4.2B combined value. The Crunchbase overlay button cross-matches each PitchBook deal against the Crunchbase database and flags MATCH (data confirmed across both sources) or NEW (PitchBook only). The NEW rows are the highest-value finds. They are deals PitchBook captured but Crunchbase missed, usually because the founder did not file a press release.

What to copy. Always run the overlay. NEW-tagged deals are the rounds your competitors are not emailing yet because they only watch Crunchbase. That is your timing edge.

11

Triangulating CB × PB × SEC Form D

Each source fills a gap the other two leave open. Crunchbase says Cadre raised $50M Series D on Apr 11, led by a16z. PitchBook adds post-money $890M, also managing Cadre Direct Access Fund III at $420M AUM. SEC Form D adds active Reg D 506(c) offering filed Mar 18, $200M target, Allen Smith (CEO) and Daniel Rosen (Head of Capital Markets) as related persons. Stacked, you have recency + AUM + named decision-maker + active offering size. That is the record that opens at 64% instead of 32%.

What to copy. The pseudo-code in the screenshot is the actual recipe. Crunchbase pulls the cohort, PitchBook adds AUM, EDGAR's Form D API adds the named persons. Score each row +20 for triangulated, +10 for PitchBook-only, baseline 50 for Crunchbase-only.

12

20-row triangulated extract · sample output

The final extract is one CSV with 20 rows, 8 columns, and every row triangulated across all three sources. Of 20 prospects, 18 have an ACTIVE Form D filing within 180 days, 15 cleared the triangulation score threshold of 60, and every named contact in column 8 came from the Form D filing itself, which means the cold email lands at a person who has legal accountability for the raise.

What to copy. The 18 of 20 ACTIVE Form D rate is typical for RE syndication cohorts. PropTech cohorts run lower (~9 of 20) because many PropTech platforms raise equity rather than offer LP shares.

13

The funded-= -budget outreach window

A firm that just closed a round has cash, a board mandate, and three to six months before pressure mounts. The reply-rate decay on Leadfins' 842-campaign cohort study is sharp: 14.2% in days 0-30, 11.8% days 31-60, 9.3% days 61-90, then collapsing to 3.4% past day 180. The template that produces those numbers names the round and the lead inside the first six words and offers a peer reference in the middle. The CTA is small and easy to decline, which actually raises reply rate.

What to copy. Re-run your Crunchbase + PitchBook + Form D pipeline weekly. The 90-day window only stays open if your list refreshes faster than your competitors' lists.

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