He also said that pricing will evolve as the product evolves, but currently the startup charges licensing and API usage fees. ![]() When asked for more specifics on how they gain an upper edge on freshness, Ruderman didn’t share many specifics (and given that it’s a competitive moat, I’m not too surprised by this). “We’re able to keep data up-to-date at scale, and merge together fragmented bits of structured and unstructured data from all over the web with confidence,” Ruderman said, adding that its main measure of success is an internal score they use that captures freshness, inventory and taxonomy. Ruderman admitted that data reliability and consistency is one of the hardest problems to get right - and that their strategy is a big differentiator for them. Step 1 is just bringing all information about all companies into our index so that when they are doing that search explicitly, they end up finding lots of companies that meet that criteria that they may not have identified through their networks.” “The associates, networks, and the partners and their alumni networks…they work with founders that are already in their portfolio companies that can help connect them with other people. “The core thing is the way they searched for now is more implicit than explicit, meaning they lean on their networks a lot, right?,” Ruderman said. (One founder even played a prank once, listing that Andreessen Horowitz was an investor in his startup on Crunchbase when other investors piled on looking to put money into his upstart, he explained it was a joke to show the poor quality of data on the platform, reports Bloomberg).Īnother question to consider is if Harmonic truly helps investors break out of their pattern matching tendencies, or just helps reinforce already existent values. But, as other solutions have matured, the cleanliness and reliability of said data has come into question. In a landscape where investors are re-learning discipline, data feels safe. Fintech unicorn Clearco and venture firm SignalFire have spent years implementing data-focused investment processes, joined by AngelList and Hum Capital. In theory, algorithmic investing hedges against investors’ preconceived notions and pushes emotions to the side. Harmonic joins a flock of other startups trying to make venture more data-driven, transparent and equitable. Harmonic’s aggregation differentiation, per Ruderman, is the intelligence it uses to help recognize which public data is more accurate for certain fields, and then merges those sources to develop the “most accurate, fresh representation at any point in time.” “We go out and look at every nook and cranny of the web where there might be information about companies and we take that structured and unstructured data and figure out how to merge it all together into some canonical representation of a company,” Ruderman told TechCrunch. Harmonic is a more specific version of its largest competitors, Crunchbase and PitchBook, which aggregate and organize private startup data. The data platform, led by Max Ruderman and co-founded by Bryan Casey andĪjay Sohmshetty, thinks it can help executives discover the next big startups without hundreds of hours of manual sourcing and research. This is Harmonic’s vision well, only if you swap out Siri for Harmonic’s text-based startup search query tool. Siri, show me fintech companies, founded in the last two years, that haven’t raised over the past year but have grown headcount by 100% in the same time frame and can it be founded by Stanford alumni whose Twitter traction has grown by at least 50% in the last six months?
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