What source should they use for their research? The phone. Everybody in the investor community knows who's investing and who's not. You just pick up the phone a

What source should they use for their research? The phone. Everybody in the investor community knows who's investing and who's not. You just pick up the phone and call someone you're on good terms with, or you make sure to ask 'who else should I be talking to?' at the end of a meeting. If you want info on a specific firm, you say 'Is X a good fit? Are they investing right now?' I've rarely gotten anything but a completely forthright answer. If you're looking to use some independent data source that doesn't involve talking to people (which is the wrong way to go about it because fundraising is inherently a social networking exercise), I'm not sure all the data is universally public. The best source for brand new financings (although not follow-on rounds) is probably the Twitter bot VCDelta (twitter.com/vcdelta), since VCs tend to be good at updating their portfolio pages. Perhaps you could also get institutional fundraising information from the Form Ds (formds.com). I suspect the Crunchbase data will only get worse as the importance of TechCrunch continues to shrink.