We’re pleased to announce that Craft Ventures is leading the
$25 million Series A round for Grata, the leading private company intelligence engine. I’ve gotten to know co-founders Andrew and Nevin over the last two years and am excited to join them on the Board of Directors.

When we first met Grata, they were a scrappy team that was bootstrapping a solution to a problem they suffered from in their previous jobs in private equity and management consulting: the opacity of information available about companies in the middle market. This is an often overlooked but meaningful segment of the market. The middle market is bigger than most people realize and a lot of groups care about it: corporates, private equity funds, bankers, hedge funds, family offices, to name a few. And yet — no other data providers focus on the middle market because it’s hard: millions of companies, high volume of changes and little information readily accessible.

No other data providers focus on the middle market because it’s hard: millions of companies, high volume of changes, and little information readily accessible.

Before Grata, dealmakers would turn to Google to manually search for companies. And since the results were noisy, teams of analysts would go website by website to discover and decipher company credentials. Databases such as Dun & Bradstreet with their broad categories and stale information didn’t address their needs. What’s more, private company data is dominated by companies who had a transaction event: Pitchbook and Crunchbase report on public and private company funding news. But who covers the middle market companies who are bootstrapped or outside of the tech ecosystem and media spotlight? They account for 50% of US GDP.

Who covers the middle market companies who are bootstrapped or outside of the tech ecosystem and media spotlight? They account for 50% of US GDP.

Grata has created a highly automated technology system that ingests this thorny problem and produces an easy to access, new source of truth for all dealmakers that care about the middle market. It uses proprietary machine learning and web crawling practices to read contextual information on the web and understand how a company describes its business. The Covid pandemic thrust many businesses online out of necessity, helped by a new economy of no-code website builders, which makes Grata’s sourcing practice even more potent. Its automated way of collecting and interpreting data is scalable and supported by their team of highly technical data scientists and engineers.

That scrappy team I met two years ago now has millions in revenue, and is growing 20% month-over-month driven by the value they bring to the dealmakers they serve. Please welcome us in congratulating the Grata team. They’re hiring! You can see their jobs page here.