Clearbit, a startup that provides a number of business intelligence APIs, is today launching to provide powerful company and person information for developers.
The idea is simple: send Clearbit an email address or company URL via an API call and you’ll get back a bunch of useful information on the person or company you’ve queried.
Clearbit indexes public information on companies and people so its customers can programatically get info quickly and reliably about them in a flash. It also provides APIs for quick OFAC compliance checks on names and address validity checks.
For example, a quick API call for uber.com would return company social profiles, office addresses, market verticals, total employees and other data like how much money the company has raised in the past.
The idea is simple, but is something that’s been hard to come by in the past. Clearbit wants to be the place to go for developers who are looking to build in these kinds of data sources easily.
Alex Maccaw, CEO of Clearbit, told us that as the company launches today, it’s announcing that its raised $2 million dollars led by SV Angel and First Round Capital with participation from Box Group, S2, Zetta along with other notable investors.
That should be no surprise, considering the wealth of information the company is sitting on. Clearbit indexes its own information by crawling websites with no interaction whatsoever.
Maccaw also told us that 1.2 million companies are already indexed, which make up most of the US.
It already has big names onboard, like Stripe, Zendesk, Asana and Intercom who are actively using the tool in their products. Maccaw says that investors are using Clearbit too, sending queries to find things out like how many companies in the area that are worth more than a certain amount.
Along with today’s launch of version 1.0, Clearbit is announcing Salesforce support. The utility of the service comes into its own here; when you enter an email address for a sales lead, Clearbit pulls in everything it knows about that person.
People and companies can opt out of Clearbit’s indexing if they’re not interested in appearing at all and the company has no plans to surface its massive amount of data via a search engine interface any time soon. It’s strictly sticking to providing it via APIs.
According to Maccaw, nobody is doing the breadth of what Clearbit is doing; he wants companies to think of it as “the Amazon Web Services of data” or the “one stop shop” for company and people information.
Clearbit’s pricing starts at $99 per month for 12,500 API calls to each search type.
Maccaw says that “anyone with a freemium model love Clearbit” and the end goal is to provide a powerful suite of data APIs that almost any Software-as-a-Service company can utilize.
➤ Clearbit
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