Some startups make excellent investment opportunities. The startup culture has taken all verticals, and we see entrepreneurs raising a dozen successful startup companies every year. The solid chances of success and widespread startup culture make startups attractive to investors. Since 40% of startups are profitable, no wonder you want to learn more about it.

How do you find viable investment opportunities in the sea of startups, then?

The answer lies in startup data. Below you can learn more about this type of data, how it can help you find startups to invest in, and how to acquire this valuable data.

What is Startup Data?

Have you ever heard about the term firmographic data? It’s equivalent to demographics in the B2B world. Such a data set contains vital information about businesses across verticals and markets. For instance, it includes the company name, location, and financial performance. Startup data is a specialized type of firmographic data.

Instead of offering thousands upon thousands of business data entities to comb through, startup data is significantly more specific. It is a data set that exclusively focuses on startup information compiled from numerous publicly available online resources. Over the years, it has found many use cases. Before we see those use cases and how this data can help you, let’s see what it contains.

What does it Contain?

First things first: startup datasets are structured datasets. It means that they come in a standardized format and classify all data entries for ease of use and analytics. Most commonly, you will find the following information in every data entity:

• Startup name
• Founder name
• Headcount
• Founding year
• Number of founded startups
• Unicorn experience
• Country the startup was founded in

Remember that startup datasets from reputable vendors can contain up to 60 data points attached to each entity in the dataset. How can this data be of help when you are researching investment opportunities? Let’s see.

How Startup Data Can Help You Make Smart Investments

When investing in startups, the more information you have, the better, as it’s the only way to make a sound and informed decision. Here is how this data can help you achieve it.

Save Precious Time

Instead of doing all the research on your own and compiling data across tables and spreadsheets, this data can provide instant access to actionable information. You will save hundreds of hours of groundwork and instead devote that time to assessing various opportunities and choosing the one that aligns with your goals as an investor.

Discover Startup Founders

Assessing the startup’s product or service idea is not enough to make a sound investment decision. Your focus should also be on the startup’s founder. Identifying who that is as soon as the startup launches can be challenging in some niches. This data enables you to discover startups in the earliest stages and see who the founder is.

Assess Founders’ Experience

Once you’ve discovered the startup’s founder, things become pretty straightforward, especially when you have access to startup data. Now you can check their history as entrepreneurs. You can see which startups they’ve founded and even uncover if they left any startups in stealth mode. In other words, you can assess the specific founder’s performance and make informed assumptions about where their new startup is heading.

Where to Get Startup Data

Leveraging startup data is the optimal way to find startups viable for investment. How do you get the correct data, then? Compiling it on your own takes a lot of time.

The best alternative is to use data vendor services. Reputable vendors on the market offer startup databases ready for use. They regularly update and screen them for errors to ensure you get recent and accurate data.

These datasets are convenient to use for multiple reasons. Most importantly, you don’t have to be a data professional to make sense of the data because it’s properly structured. Secondly, you can easily integrate these databases with your tools, such as a CRM, to streamline deal sourcing.

Conclusion

Keep tabs on startup data if your investment portfolio includes many startups. It’s a robust dataset able to streamline your investment decision-making, helping you research startup founders and discover performance along with other essential startup data. The next unicorn might be just a few clicks away. Dive deeper into startup data and try to identify it.