Specter vs Crustdata
Over 400 VC funds source on Specter, the data layer for private markets: 55M+ companies, 550M+ people, 330K+ investors and 1M+ transactions, refreshed by new signals daily.
A data pipe is infrastructure. A signal layer is an edge. Crustdata hands your engineers clean, live public company data. Specter adds the datasets nobody else sells (observed investor intent, modeled revenue and valuation, 1,000+ talent signals a day) and delivers them to the whole fund: app, API, warehouse and agent.
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Here are the main reasons investment teams pick Specter over Crustdata as their private markets data layer:
Data coverage
250+ data points per company, resolved live from 15+ sources, with on-demand crawl for companies not yet indexed (per Crustdata's site). Headline company and people totals aren't published.
One connected graph with four entity types: 55M+ companies and 550M+ people, plus 330K+ investors and 1M+ transactions. 250+ data points per company and 60+ per person, organized under an industry taxonomy detailed enough to filter the long tail niche by niche.
What counts as a signal
The Watcher API pushes a webhook when a tracked attribute changes: a job change, a funding announcement, a department-level hiring surge.
The same change detection, and then four proprietary feeds you can't derive from public attributes: predicted investor and acquirer intent, AI plus human verified revenue disclosures (500+ a day), stealth-founder emergence, and news distilled from 60,000+ verified sources.
Investor intent
Only on SpecterReports funding rounds when they're announced, with investors named on the company record.
7,000+ confidence-scored investor-interest signals a week flag who is likely to lead the round before the headline, drawn from observed engagement between partners, founders and C-suites. No public attribute carries this; it's a dataset only Specter builds.
Revenue Signals
Only on SpecterRevenue appears as an available field on the company profile, alongside headcount, traffic and reviews.
Reported revenue whenever it's been disclosed, plus a live feed of 500+ verified revenue and profitability disclosures a day, AI plus human checked, from news, social, podcasts, press releases and filings. Specter also models a monthly revenue figure for every private company, so a number exists even when nobody has disclosed one.
Valuations
Only on SpecterCarries the valuation that a round announcement makes public.
Reported valuations when rounds make them public, plus a valuation estimate that keeps moving between rounds: re-modeled monthly, snapped to every priced round, and published with a 90% confidence band. Quantile-regressed revenue stacked with funding history, investor quality and stage.
Founders & stealth
Only on SpecterPeople Search and People Enrichment with around 90 data points per person, plus LinkedIn posts by person (per Crustdata's docs).
550M+ people with role history, education and founder pedigree, plus 1,000+ talent signals a day: new stealth founders (roughly 136K tracked), unicorn and Fortune-500 spinouts, and fresh YC founders and applicants. You can reach the founder before the company has a website.
Who can use it
Designed for machine and developer access; the sourcing UI and workflow layer are yours to build.
A web app the whole fund logs into: saved searches that turn into live feeds, a Chrome extension, network tracking, and native CRM sync with Salesforce, Affinity, Attio and Airtable. The partner, the analyst and the pipeline all read the same record, and nothing has to be built first.
AI Search & Agents
Positioned for AI agents from the start: Crustdata MCP is live, and the API is built for agent and developer workflows.
Agents, Specter's agentic AI chat, ship native in the platform: quick to drive, steerable with skills, and grounded in the full Specter database plus web search. Natural-language and semantic search runs across all 55M+ companies right beside them. And Specter MCP puts the whole dataset, signal feeds included, inside Claude, Cursor, OpenAI, or any agent you run.
Delivery surface
Real-time API plus flat-file company and people datasets, refreshed monthly and delivered as CSV or JSON (per Crustdata's pricing page).
The web app, one API for everything (enrichment is the job most teams give it first), bulk delivery into AWS, Google Cloud or Snowflake as CSV or Parquet, the Chrome extension, CRM sync and Specter MCP. The same dataset in the app, the API, the warehouse and the CRM.
What the API exposes
Company and people enrichment and search, dedicated Jobs and Posts APIs, Watcher webhooks and on-demand crawl of unindexed companies. Well documented, with a public credit table and published rate limits (per Crustdata's docs).
Around 64 endpoint paths across four entity types: companies, people, investors and transactions, with all four signal feeds as first-class endpoints and estimates returned with P10/P90 bands and their anchoring disclosures. Pages carry up to 5,000 records for real backfills.
Specter has data Crustdata doesn't.
A short list of what you get on Specter that isn't part of Crustdata's dataset. The full rundown lives on the platform page.
What's on Specter but not on Crustdata:
- Predictive investor and acquirer intent
- Modeled revenue on every private company
- Valuation estimates between rounds
- Stealth-founder detection, ~136K tracked
- 330K+ investor profiles with portfolios
- 1M+ transactions, queryable directly
- A web app, extension and CRM sync (no build)
- Team network tracking
- And more
The most complete private-markets API.
One REST API on OpenAPI 3.0 reaches the entire dataset: companies, people, investors and transactions, the four proprietary signal feeds, modeled revenue and valuation, verified emails and your team's network graph. Enrichment is the job most teams give it first, and every list or saved search built in the app doubles as a live feed.
Signal feeds are endpoints
Revenue, Talent, Investor-Interest and News signals are addressable resources, each carrying confidence scores, source attribution and dates. The proprietary datasets aren't trapped in a UI; your pipeline reads them the same way the app does.
Four entity types, one key
Around 64 endpoint paths and 65 schemas span companies, people, investors with funds and portfolios, and transactions covering funding rounds, acquisitions and IPOs, plus estimates, verified emails, network and logs. A single team key on X-API-KEY covers all of it.
Uncertainty is a field
The estimates endpoint returns modeled revenue and valuation with P10 and P90 bounds, a confidence tier and the count of anchoring disclosures. You can audit the number inside the payload instead of taking a range on faith.
Sized for backfills
Pagination runs to 5,000 records per page, and bulk by-id endpoints cover companies, people and talent. A full market map becomes one job rather than a thousand requests.
Searches built in the app, read in code
An analyst assembles a search or list in the web app; the pipeline pulls every result over the API and subscribes to new matches as they land. The two stay in sync by construction, and building searches spends no credits.
Headers that keep pipelines polite
Workspace-level rate and credit limits come back on every response through X-RateLimit and X-CreditLimit-Reset headers, so long-running jobs back off cleanly instead of failing mid-sweep.
Misses 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 queued for gathering, so the retry can land.
Docs your agents can read
The reference ships as llms.txt, llms-full.txt and Markdown per page, and Specter MCP exposes the same dataset directly to agents. Crustdata's docs are excellent too; the difference here is the LLM-native format.
Specter API vs Crustdata API
Specter figures come from its API docs; Crustdata figures from docs.crustdata.com and its pricing page. "Not published" means Crustdata doesn't state the figure publicly, not that the capability is missing.
The private market data platform VCs trust.
The funds that benchmark every vendor land 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 that run on Specter data.
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The full private-markets picture, in one platform.
More than 400 venture funds make Specter their source of record for private markets: 55M+ companies, 550M+ people and 1M+ transactions, with new signals arriving daily.
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 |