Specter vs SourceScrub
SourceScrub maps where a company's name shows up: roughly 17M listings connected to 290,000 conference rosters, award lists and directories, per its own site. Specter watches what happens inside 50M+ companies and 700M+ people, and flags the moment something moves.
A list is a starting point. A signal is a reason to call. Over 400 VC funds run their sourcing on Specter for exactly that reason: the deals, the people, and the context to reach a founder before the process starts.
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Here are the main reasons VCs choose Specter over SourceScrub as their private market data platform:
Data coverage
Roughly 17M company listings connected to 290,000 origin sources, per its own site, weighted toward founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market.
50M+ companies and 700M+ people, nearly three times the listings SourceScrub reports, plus 350K+ investors and 1M+ transactions. Coverage runs from garage-stage and stealth through decacorn and public, so the next breakout is already in the data before it wins an award or shows up on a conference list.
Depth per record
Company listings carry firmographics, contact details, growth metrics and the source lists where each name appears.
Every company comes with 250+ data points and every person with 60+: funding, hiring velocity, web and app traffic, app downloads and reviews, social reach, G2 and Trustpilot ratings, plus news distilled from 60,000+ verified sources.
Talent Signals
Only on SpecterA company enters the platform when its name lands on a source: a conference roster, an award list, a review site, a buyer's guide.
On Specter a company can surface before it has a website. Around 1,000 talent signals a day catch new stealth founders, unicorn and Fortune-500 spinouts, and fresh YC founders and applicants. You can reach the founder months before a round exists.
Investor Interest
Only on SpecterNine validated essential data signals, plus custom rule-based scoring to rank companies against your strategy, per SourceScrub's site.
Predictive Investor Interest signals, 7,000+ a week, read observed engagement between partners and founders and flag likely funding or acquisition intent, confidence-scored, before anything reaches the press.
Revenue Signals
Only on SpecterSurfaces growth and benchmark context on company profiles.
Reported revenue for companies that have disclosed it, a live feed of 500+ verified revenue and profitability signals a day from news, social, podcasts and filings, and a modeled monthly revenue estimate on every private company, not only the ones that disclose.
Valuations
Only on SpecterShows investment history and funding details on company profiles.
Reported valuations whenever a round makes one public, plus a valuation estimate that stays current between rounds: revenue is modeled first, then valuation stacks on funding history, investor quality and stage, re-anchored at every priced round and re-rated monthly, with a 90% confidence band.
Freshness
An expert-in-the-loop pipeline works continuously across its sources, and conference lists can land within a couple of weeks of an event.
500+ revenue signals and roughly 1,000 talent signals arrive every day, plus 7,000+ investor-interest signals a week, with news drawn from 60,000+ verified sources. When something changes inside a company, the record changes with it.
AI Search & Agents
SourcingGPT screens and analyzes companies with AI, on top of the rule-based custom scoring.
Agents, Specter's agentic AI chat, are built into the platform: simple to use, tunable with skills, and grounded in the full Specter database plus web search. Natural-language and semantic search cover all 50M+ companies. And Specter MCP plugs the dataset into Claude, Cursor, OpenAI, or any agent, so your agents work from the same live data as your analysts.
Delivery surface
Web app, native CRM integrations with Salesforce, DealCloud, Affinity and Sugar, an API, Data Connect Cloud warehouse delivery, and a custom research service.
Web app, the market's most complete and best priced API, delivery straight into AWS, GCP and Snowflake, a Chrome extension, CRM sync across Salesforce, Affinity, Attio and Airtable, and Specter MCP. Wherever your team works, the data is already there.
What the API exposes
An API plus Data Connect Cloud warehouse delivery ship alongside the app; SourceScrub describes both at a high level rather than in a published developer reference (per its site).
Around 64 documented endpoint paths, with signal feeds as first-class resources: Revenue, Talent, Investor-Interest and News sit next to companies, people, investors and transactions. Whatever your team watches in the app, your pipeline can pull.
Specter has data SourceScrub doesn't.
Some of what Specter carries has no SourceScrub equivalent. For the full run-down of what the platform covers, take a look at the platform page.
On Specter, not on SourceScrub:
- 33M more companies
- A people graph 700M strong
- Stealth-founder detection
- Modeled revenue on every private company
- A valuation estimate between rounds
- 7,000+ investor-interest signals a week
- Signal feeds as API resources
- And more
A best-in-class private-markets API.
REST on OpenAPI 3.0, reaching the whole platform: companies, people, investors and transactions, all four signal feeds, revenue and valuation estimates, and your team's network graph. Lists and saved searches from the app double as live feeds, and one AI-search endpoint turns plain English into full record objects. SourceScrub ships an API and warehouse delivery too; the difference is what travels through it.
Signal feeds ship as endpoints
Revenue, Talent, Investor-Interest and News each get dedicated endpoints, with confidence scores, source attribution and dates attached. A pipeline can subscribe to the same events your analysts see in the app.
The most complete, best priced API
One API carries the whole platform: companies, people, investors, transactions, estimates, all four signal feeds and enrichment, the job most teams put it on first. It's the most complete and best priced API on the market.
Estimates travel over the wire
GET /v1/companies/{domain}/estimates returns modeled revenue and valuation with the median, the P10/P90 band, a confidence tier and the disclosures the model anchors to. A defensible number, not a range.
Plain English in, full records out
A single AI-search endpoint covers eight products: companies, people, investors, talent signals, interest signals, funding rounds, acquisitions and IPOs. Describe the target in a sentence and Specter converts it into filters and returns complete record objects.
Saved searches double as live feeds
Anything assembled in the app, a search or a list, is readable over the API, with new matches subscribable as they land. Creating and managing them is free; credits are only spent on the data you pull.
The team network, queryable
Network endpoints map everyone your team knows on LinkedIn, deduplicated across teammates: who has a path into a target company, in which role, and whose intro would be warmest.
Unmatched lookups cost nothing
Enrichment resolves companies, people and investors from a domain, LinkedIn URL or email, and only matched results are charged. A record Specter doesn't hold yet gets gathered on demand, so a retry can succeed.
Throughput built for backfills
Pages carry up to 5,000 records at 15 requests per second, with bulk by-id endpoints for companies, people and talent. Rate and credit limits surface in response headers, so pipelines back off cleanly instead of failing.
Specter API vs SourceScrub API
Specter figures come from its published API docs. SourceScrub offers an API, Data Connect Cloud warehouse delivery and native CRM integrations, but no detailed public reference, so "Not published" marks anything its site doesn't state.
| Capability | SourceScrub | |
|---|---|---|
| What's included | ||
| Programmatic access | Yes | Yes |
| Company & people databases | Companies + contact data | 50M+ companies, 700M+ people |
| Funding rounds / transactions | Investment history on profiles | 1M+ transactions |
| Modeled revenue & valuation | Confidence-banded, every company | |
| Signal feeds as endpoints | Revenue, Talent, Interest, News | |
| Team network graph | Relationship tools in-app | Dedicated endpoints |
| Verified email retrieval | Contact data included | Per-person + bulk |
| Querying & workflows | ||
| API protocol | Not published | REST (OpenAPI 3.0) |
| Plain-English search endpoint | SourcingGPT in-app | One endpoint, all eight products |
| Saved searches as live feeds | Not published | Lists + searches, subscribable |
| Native CRM integrations | Salesforce, DealCloud, Affinity, Sugar | Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio, Airtable |
| Lookups that find no match | Not published | No credit spent, fetched on demand |
| Scale & freshness | ||
| Max page size | Not published | Up to 5,000 |
| Rate limit | Not published | 15 requests/sec |
| Bulk / warehouse delivery | Data Connect Cloud | AWS, GCP or Snowflake |
| Docs & agents | ||
| LLM / agent-native docs | Not published | llms.txt, llms-full.txt + Markdown |
| Runs inside AI agents | Not published | Specter MCP + four signal feeds |
The trusted private market data platform for VCs.
Funds compare the field, then build on Specter.
“Specter will become table stakes for any fund that wants to be in the top quartile.”
Richard Dulude
Partner, Underscore VC
“In a short period of time, Specter has become an integral part of how we ensure we have 100% coverage of the markets we operate in.”
Gideon Hayden
Partner, Leaders Fund
“We've already found one of our investments through Specter. Its value extends well beyond pure sourcing.”
Pietro Invernizzi
Founder, firedrop
Join the 400+ venture firms sourcing on Specter's private market data.
Give us 30 minutes and we'll run your target market through Specter, live.
Book a demoFrequently Asked Questions
For venture-stage sourcing, yes. SourceScrub is a sources-first platform built mainly for PE, M&A and investment banking teams working the lower and middle market, and it does that job well. Specter is built for investors who need to know what is happening inside 50M+ companies right now: founders going stealth, revenue moving, investors circling. If your edge depends on reaching a founder before a process starts, Specter is the stronger fit, and plenty of firms run both platforms side by side.
A few things, and they're real. SourceScrub cleans and cross-indexes hundreds of thousands of origin sources, so you can see everywhere a company's name appears, and its conference tooling can scrub a trade-show attendee list against your investment criteria before you book flights. It also offers custom research as a service, and reviewers credit it with strong coverage of never-funded, founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market. Specter doesn't compete on those. Specter's ground is live intelligence: signals, estimates and a people graph across 50M+ companies.
Specter tracks 50M+ companies against the roughly 17M listings SourceScrub reports on its own site, along with 700M+ people, 350K+ investors and 1M+ transactions. Depth scales with it: 250+ data points per company and 60+ per person, where SourceScrub's people data centers on contact information for outreach. The extra ground matters most at the early stage, where a company can exist for months before its name reaches any list.
Yes, and that is the point of Talent Signals. A company reaches a source list after it has exhibited, won an award or been reviewed, all of which happen well after founding. Specter catches the founding moment itself: roughly 1,000 talent signals a day flag new stealth founders, unicorn and Fortune-500 spinouts, and new YC founders and applicants. The MBA Fund found one of its portfolio investments this way, before the company had surfaced anywhere else.
Yes, on every private company, each with a 90% confidence band. Revenue is modeled monthly and anchored to verified disclosures, while a live Revenue Signals feed adds 500+ verified data points a day from news, social, podcasts and filings. Valuation builds on the revenue model together with funding history, investor quality and stage, then re-anchors at each priced round and re-rates monthly between them. SourceScrub surfaces growth and benchmark context on profiles; it doesn't model either number.
The data is real-time. Daily incrementals run across every dataset: company, people, investor, news, revenue, talent, transactions and funding signals. The API always serves the live record, so a pull reflects what is true at that moment rather than a snapshot.
Hygiene happens upstream, before anything reaches your screen. News comes from 60,000+ verified sources and each story carries a significance score, which keeps feeds quiet. Revenue figures arrive normalized to USD with context and profitability flags. Predictive signals ship with confidence scores, and every company, person, investor and transaction keeps a stable ID that joins cleanly across the platform and the API. That standard is what lets funds run their own models on Specter data.
Yes. Agents, Specter's agentic AI chat, are native to the platform: straightforward to use, extendable with skills, and grounded in the entire Specter database plus web search. Alongside them sits natural-language and semantic search across all 50M+ companies. And through Specter MCP, the same dataset plugs into Claude, Cursor, OpenAI, or any agent you already run.
Very likely. Specter runs as a web app, an API that is the best priced on the market, warehouse delivery to AWS, Google Cloud and Snowflake in CSV or Parquet, a Chrome extension, CRM sync for Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio and Airtable, and Specter MCP for agents. One dataset, arriving wherever the team already operates, and no rebuild of your workflow required.
One platform, the whole private market.
Over 400 VC funds make Specter their data layer for private markets: 50M+ companies, 700M+ people and 1M+ transactions, with a fresh wave of signals arriving daily.
The app investors live in.
Search 50M+ companies, follow the signal feeds, and see your team's warmest path into every deal.
