Specter vs CB Insights
Over 400 VC funds run their sourcing on Specter: 55M+ companies, 550M+ people, 330K+ investors and 1M+ transactions, with new signals arriving daily.
A score tells you what a company is. A signal tells you what just happened. Specter is built around the signal: the moment revenue moves, a founder goes stealth or a tier-1 investor starts circling, you know, and you can be first to the conversation.
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These are the main reasons investment teams choose Specter over CB Insights as their private market data platform:
Data coverage
Private-company coverage passing 11 million, per its January 2026 product launch, with particular depth on venture-backed and emerging tech.
55M+ companies and 550M+ people, roughly 5× the company coverage, plus 330K+ investors and 1M+ transactions. Most of the extra 44 million sits outside any research index: bootstrapped, stealth and just-founded companies that no score has reached yet, which is where you find deals before other funds do.
Depth per record
Company profiles built for assessment: funding history, scores, business relationships and market context.
250+ data points per company, 60+ per person: firmographics and funding history, hiring velocity, web and app traffic, app-store downloads and reviews, social reach, G2 and Trustpilot scores, plus news distilled from 60,000+ sources.
People & Talent
Only on SpecterTracks companies, business relationships and alumni-founded startups; people data is not a standalone product.
550M+ people with 60+ data points each: verified role history, education, prior-employer pedigree, VC-backed and serial-founder flags, and verified email retrieval. On top of the graph, 1,000+ talent signals a day: stealth founders, unicorn and Fortune-500 spinouts, and fresh YC founders, flagged the day they surface.
Revenue Signals
Only on SpecterShows estimated revenue on company profiles, alongside funding data.
Reported revenue whenever a company has disclosed it, plus 500+ verified revenue and profitability data points a day, checked by AI and humans, sourced from news, social, podcasts, press releases and filings. Every private company also gets a modeled monthly revenue estimate, anchored to verified disclosures with a P10/P90 confidence band.
Live valuations
Only on SpecterShows estimated private valuations on company profiles, updated as rounds are disclosed.
Reported valuations whenever they're public, and a valuation that keeps moving between rounds: modeled monthly from revenue, funding history, investor quality and stage, re-anchored to every priced round, always with a confidence band that shows how reliable the number is.
Predictions
Mosaic scores 230,000+ companies from 0 to 1,000 across four factors, which CB Insights describes as covering more than 75% of venture-funded startups, with published methodology and validation. Commercial Maturity and Exit Probability scores sit alongside it.
Investor Interest Signals predict a specific near-term event: who is about to back or acquire whom, drawn from observed engagement between partners and founders. 7,000+ a week, each confidence-scored. A different kind of prediction: not how strong a company looks, but whether a deal is forming right now.
Freshness
Daily intel briefings, analyst reports across 1,500+ markets, and periodic score and dataset refreshes.
Specter updates continuously: 500+ revenue signals and 1,000+ talent signals land every day, with 7,000+ investor-interest signals arriving weekly, plus news from 60,000+ verified sources, all structured and company-linked. An event shows up in your feed the day it's detected.
AI Search & Agents
ChatCBI answers natural-language questions over its Business Graph, AI Agents handle scouting and diligence research, a Browser Analyst extension works alongside the browser, and an MCP integration shipped in January 2026.
Agents, Specter's agentic AI chat, are native to the product: quick to pick up, tunable with skills, and wired to the full Specter database plus web search. Natural-language and semantic search spans all 55M+ companies beside them. And Specter MCP plugs the dataset into Claude, Cursor, OpenAI, or any agent you already run, carrying 250+ data points per company, all four live signal feeds, and modeled revenue and valuation.
Delivery surface
Web platform and a broad enterprise surface: Salesforce, Snowflake, an Excel add-in, a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector, Affinity, Zapier and a mobile app, with an API on higher tiers (per third-party reporting).
Web app, the most complete and best priced API on the market, warehouse drops to AWS, GCP and Snowflake, a Chrome extension, CRM sync for Salesforce, Affinity, Attio and Airtable, and Specter MCP. The same dataset in every tool your team already uses.
What the API exposes
An API is available on higher-tier plans (per third-party reporting), alongside Snowflake delivery and the Excel add-in. Page sizes, rate limits and endpoint details aren't published.
Every signal feed is a first-class API resource: Revenue, Talent, Investor-Interest and News endpoints sit next to companies, people, investors and transactions. Anything your analysts watch in the app, your pipelines can query.
Specter has data CB Insights doesn't.
A short list of what Specter carries that CB Insights doesn't. The full run-down of what the platform covers lives on the platform page.
What CB Insights doesn't cover:
- 44M more companies
- A 550M+ person graph with verified emails
- Stealth-founder detection, ~136K tracked
- Live revenue signals, 500+ a day
- Predictive investor-interest signals
- A live valuation between rounds
- Saved searches as live API feeds
- And more
The most complete and best priced API on the market.
One REST API, built on OpenAPI 3.0, covers the whole platform: company, people, investor and transaction data, the four live signal feeds, and your team's network graph. A saved search in the app becomes a feed on the API, and plain-English queries run through a single AI-search endpoint across every product.
The best-priced API on the market
One Specter API reaches the entire platform: companies, people, investors, transactions, all four signal feeds and enrichment, the job most teams put it to first, with no web-app seat required. CB Insights gates API access to higher tiers, per third-party reporting.
Live signals, first-class endpoints
Revenue, Talent, Investor-Interest and News signals each get dedicated endpoints, carrying confidence scores, source attribution and dates. A score field tells you where a company stands today; a signal endpoint streams what changed this morning.
Estimates ship in the payload
The estimates endpoint returns modeled revenue and valuation with the median, the P10/P90 band, a confidence tier and the anchoring disclosures. The model's uncertainty travels with the number rather than hiding in a methodology page.
Ask in plain English
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 full record objects.
Searches double as live feeds
Any search or list saved in the app is readable over the API, with subscriptions for new matches as they land. Analysts and pipelines watch one surface. Creating and managing searches costs no credits; you pay only when data moves.
The team network, over the wire
Network endpoints return everyone your team collectively knows on LinkedIn, deduplicated across teammates: who holds a warm path into a target company, in what role, and which teammate should send the note.
Unmatched lookups cost nothing
Enrichment resolves companies, people and investors from a domain, LinkedIn URL or email, and credits are spent only on matches. A record Specter hasn't gathered yet gets queued on demand, so the retry can hit.
Throughput for warehouse-scale pulls
Pagination runs to 5,000 records per page at 15 requests a second, with bulk by-id endpoints on top. Rate and credit limits surface in X-RateLimit and X-CreditLimit headers, so pipelines back off cleanly instead of guessing.
Specter API vs CB Insights API
Specter's column comes from its API docs. CB Insights figures come from its own site and third-party reporting. "Not published" means the figure doesn't appear in its public materials.
The private market data platform VCs trust.
Firms that compare every platform keep landing 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
See the platform 400+ venture firms use to reach deals first.
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The whole private market, on one platform.
Over 400 VC funds count on Specter for their private market data: 55M+ companies, 550M+ people and 1M+ transactions, with new signals added every day.
The app investors live in.
Search 55M+ companies, follow the signal feeds, and see your team's warmest path into every deal.
Companies
People
Investors
Transactions
Company | Tagline | Growth Stage | HQ Location | Employee Count | 3m | Web Visits | 3m | Total Funding Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Vendra | Vendra provides AI vendor and project management for hardware teams. | Pre-seed / Seed | San Francisco, US | 9 | +80% | 12,795 | +6,670% | $500K |
 Beyond Reach Labs (YC W26) | Beyond Reach Labs develops deployable high-expansion structures. | Pre-seed / Seed | New York City, US | 11 | +450% | 7,910 | +80% | $10.5M |
 Phoebe | Phoebe schedules care providers automatically, reducing burnout. | Pre-seed / Seed | New York City, US | 27 | +145% | 16,121 | +70% | $9.5M |
 Autosana (YC S25) | Autosana automates mobile app end-to-end testing using AI. | Pre-seed / Seed | San Francisco, US | 7 | +75% | 12,077 | +101% | $3.2M |
 Vignetim | Vignetim simplifies European vignette and toll purchases. | Pre-seed / Seed | Almere Stad, NL | 11 | +57% | 5,765 | +619% | — |
 BLINQ App | BLINQ provides digital business cards for instant contact sharing. | Pre-seed / Seed | Mountain View, US | — | — | 1,340,752 | +14% | $100K |
 Amity Robotics | Amity Robotics provides AI-powered robotic platforms. | Pre-seed / Seed | Bangkok, TH | 19 | +36% | 19,273 | +4,893% | $7M |
 GojiberryAI | GojiberryAI finds high-intent leads for B2B companies. | Pre-seed / Seed | Paris, FR | 14 | +56% | 264,904 | +15% | $500K |
 Dialogue AI | Dialogue AI conducts AI-assisted customer interviews at scale. | Pre-seed / Seed | Los Angeles, US | 16 | +14% | 121,897 | +208% | $6M |
 Fort | Fort is a wearable for strength training and rehabilitation. | Pre-seed / Seed | San Francisco, US | 6 | +20% | 28,705 | +155% | $500K |
 Complir | Complir automates retail product compliance with AI. | Pre-seed / Seed | Copenhagen, DK | 19 | +19% | 10,585 | +510% | $2.6M |
 Carrot Credit | Carrot Credit offers asset-backed lines of credit. | Pre-seed / Seed | Suleja, NG | 16 | +14% | 15,250 | +336% | $4.2M |
 Ultra | Ultra builds intelligent warehouse robots for e-commerce. | Pre-seed / Seed | New York City, US | 26 | +63% | 11,605 | +211% | $500K |
 Palmier | Palmier provides autonomous AI coding agents. | Pre-seed / Seed | San Francisco, US | 2 | 0% | 202,717 | +2,209% | $500K |