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I used to maintain the investor database at an investment bank and I can say, without any doubt, that the Crunchbase data is really, truly terrible. There is si
by bjterry 14y ago
I used to maintain the investor database at an investment bank and I can say, without any doubt, that the Crunchbase data is really, truly terrible. There is simply no one in place with the right incentives to make sure that the data is updated/cleaned with any regularity. Dow Jones VentureSource and Thomson ONE have databases that track venture capital rounds fairly accurately, although obviously there are a ton of deals that are never exposed to the outside world, and there are rarely regulatory requirements that such things be disclosed.
Even when you have the data though, it's hard to tell which investors are actually still doing deals. There are a lot of small funds out there that may not do a deal every 6 months even when they are still actively looking, perhaps because they are in the tail end of their investment period and are trying to be very selective, or perhaps because their typical bite size is large relative to the capital they have to deploy. There are also investors who will tell you that they are continuing to look at deals even when they aren't in a position to invest because they don't have committed capital and it doesn't look good to be out of the market. So all around it's a pretty fuzzy condition that you are looking to describe.
Of course, having a list is still nicer than not having a list, because if you simply "tap your network" for active funds, people will just think about who they've interacted with recently, rather than actually having any knowledge about the specific proclivities of the country's hundreds of venture capital firms, organized angels, etc. It's easy to overlook reasonable candidates.