Crunchbase
Scraping Teardown
Find out everything you need to know to reliably scrape Crunchbase,
including scraping guides, Github Repos, proxy performance and more.
Crunchbase Web Scraping Overview
Crunchbase implements multiple layers of protection to prevent automated data extraction. This section provides an overview of its anti-bot systems and common challenges faced when scraping, along with insights into how these protections work and potential strategies to navigate them.
Scraping Summary
Crunchbase is a platform for discovering business information on public and private companies globally. It is popular for web scraping due to the valuable business, financial, and employee data it holds. Crunchbase does use anti-scraping systems, however, which make web scraping more challenging. Data is both publicly accessible and behind login, so scraping the website would require bypassing login systems or other alternative methods of data retrieval. From the parsing perspective, the difficulty is medium as the website structure is complex and uses dynamically generated CSS class names.
Despite these challenges, scraping Crunchbase requires a thoughtful approach, but is feasible. Proxies are often used to offset the anti-scraping measures, and Python libraries such as Beautiful Soup can aid in parsing and organizing the scraped data. Overall, due to access restrictions and parsing complexities, the difficulty for webscraping is considered hard.
Subdomains
USCrunchbase Anti-Bots
Anti-scraping systems used by Crunchbase to prevent web scraping. These systems can make it harder and more expensive to scrape the website but can be bypassed with the right tools and strategies.
Crunchbase Data
Explore the key data types available for scraping and alternative methods such as public APIs, to streamline your web data extraction process.
Data Types
No data types found
Public APIs
API Description
Crunchbase offers a public API that provides data about innovative companies, startups, and the people behind them. The API allows for exploration of this data with filters such as name, type, or the date they were added to Crunchbase.The data available through the API extends to detailed information about funding rounds, acquisitions, investors, and related news articles. It provides rich details about companies, which can be used for researching company profiles, tracking industry trends, and uncovering investment opportunities.
Access Requirements
To use the Crunchbase API, you need to sign up for an account and subscribe to one of the available plans. The API usage has certain rate limits depending on the subscribed plan.
API Data Available
Why People Use Web Scraping?
Crunchbase offers a lot of valuable data, especially for individuals or organizations interested in the startup ecosystem and business investments. However, accessing this data via the API comes at a cost, which could be a prohibitive factor for some, leading to resorting to web scraping techniques.Additionally, while the API provides access to a wealth of data, there may be certain data points or specifics not exposed through the API. In such cases, web scraping could be used as an alternative method to mine particular details of interest, making it a necessity even for a site with a public API.
Crunchbase Web Scraping Legality
Understand the legal considerations before scraping Crunchbase. Review the website's robots.txt file, terms & conditions, and any past lawsuits to assess the risks. Ensure compliance with applicable laws and minimize the chances of legal action.
Legality Review
Scraping Amazon.com presents legal risks due to strict terms of service and anti-scraping policies. The website's terms explicitly prohibit automated data extraction, and Amazon has a history of taking legal action against scrapers under laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Key risks include potential IP bans, cease-and-desist letters, and legal liability for breaching terms. To stay compliant, scrapers should review the robots.txt file, avoid collecting personal or copyrighted data, respect rate limits, and consider using publicly available APIs where possible.
Crunchbase Robots.txt
Does Crunchbase robot.txt permit web scraping?
Summary
The robots.txt file of CrunchBase gives substantial insights into which areas of the site are open for crawling and which are off-limits. Disallow rules are liberally used throughout, explicitly cutting off access to web scrapers to the vast majority of areas on the site. For example, URLs mentioned as Disallow: / sets, Disallow: /privacy, Disallow: /about, Disallow: /terms are not open for crawling to all user-agents which means that these areas of the site are off-limits to web scraping bots except for the few common whitelisted ones. The only specified Allow directive targets Googlebot and it allows it to access the organizations' and profiles' path such as Allow: /organization/* and Allow: /profile/*. This reveals that these pages are accessible for crawling by Googlebot. However, from a general developer's web scraping perspective, it's interesting to note that no explicit Allow directives are specified for any bots excluding the widely trusted ones, meaning, site content scraping for data extraction is generally not supported by the website.
Crunchbase Terms & Conditions
Does Crunchbase Terms & Conditions permit web scraping?
Summary
The terms of service explicitly prohibit any kind of data scraping or collection without express written consent. 'You may not use, display, reproduce, copy, sell, distribute, or otherwise exploit the Crunchbase Content for any purposes, including without limitation, any business purposes whatsoever.' They emphasize that accessing Crunchbase Content for unauthorized commercial purposes, which includes web scraping or crawling, are expressly forbidden. The terms also state that 'you may not use any automated system, including without limitation 'bots,' 'spiders,' or 'offline readers,'' reinforcing the restriction against using bots, spiders, offline readers or any other similar tools for data harvesting.
The repercussions for violating these terms are serious. The terms specify that 'Crunchbase reserves the right to bar any such activity,' and any damages arising out of unauthorized usage or attempts can be substantial, up to 'the maximum extent permitted under applicable law.' They also note that unauthorized attempts to access Crunchbase Content may result in civil, criminal, or administrative penalties, not only for unauthorized users but also for those facilitating such unauthorized access. This makes clear that usage beyond personal browsing can have severe legal consequences.
Crunchbase Lawsuits
Legal Actions Against Scrapers: A history of lawsuits filed by the website owner against scrapers and related entities, highlighting legal disputes, claims, and outcomes.
Lawsuits Summary
Crunchbase has not been involved in any known legal disputes related to web scraping.
Found 0 lawsuits
Crunchbase Github Repos
Find the best open-source scrapers for Crunchbase on Github. Clone them and start scraping straight away.
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Stars
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Crunchbase Web Scraping Articles
Find the best web scraping articles for Crunchbase. Learn how to get started scraping Crunchbase.
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Crunchbase Web Scraping Videos
Find the best web scraping videos for Crunchbase. Learn how to get started scraping Crunchbase.